Wouter Kellerman’s long, hard road to global Grammy success

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Wouter Kellerman, from Linden, Johannesburg, was a whizzkid at maths in school, a distinction that would lead him naturally into a career in engineering.

But there was another passion that was closer to his heart, and closer, even, to his lungs. Because Wouter has the breath of music in him, and when he holds a flute to his lips, he seems to be channeling the sounds of nature itself, the whispering of the wind and the ebb and flow of the tide.

Last year, Wouter stepped onto the stage at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles, to receive a small trophy of a gilded gramophone, the most sought-after honour in the world of recorded music.

A Grammy for Best New Age album for “Winds of Samsara”, his masterpiece of Afro-Indian fusion, recorded in collaboration with the Bangalore-based composer, Ricky Kej.

For Wouter, it was the culmination of a dream that began when his parents rented him a flute after he fell in love with the instrument at a classical concert.

But it was only after many years in engineering, including a disastrous stock exchange investment that left him almost penniless, that Wouter was able to take a deep breath and make a living from his musical passion.

Now a superstar of the diverse crossover genre known as World Music, he took time off from recording and touring to chat with Ruda about life in the frontline of the winds of change, and to play an exquisite excerpt from “The Long Road”, his epic tribute to the life and times of Nelson Mandela.

Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Change Exchange, where today we have a really, really special guest – Wouter Kellerman, I’m so glad to have met you, to have met your music, because it was a gap in my education, I must admit that.

Thanks, Ruda, it’s great to be here.

Let’s start with the beginning. You were 10 years old, I’ve heard somewhere, and your parents took you to a concert, and said, if you were to play an instrument, which one would it be?

Yes.

And you said?

The flute, because actually, I was looking at the clarinet, but my brother chose the clarinet first. So I didn’t have that option. But I like the idea of expressing myself, using my breath. Like in talking, or singing, because I just think it’s so natural and so expressive. And I saw that the flute points aside, while everything else points to the front, so I thought that must be a special instrument. So my 10-year-old thinking, that’s what I’ve decided to go for, and I’m really grateful for that, because the flute is such an expressive instrument and it can do so many things, we have extended techniques on the flute. So you can play a beautiful classical melody – you can put a bit of breath in it and have this jazzy influence, or you can do something more funky, or you can use the sounds of the pads, you can sing while you play, you can beat box while you play – we call that flute boxing … So I like all those sounds, while expressing myself making music.

Tell me about your very first flute?

Yes, you know, I couldn’t wait to start … My parents rented a flute, and then the teacher was sick, so I couldn’t have my first lesson, and my parents wouldn’t allow me to put the flute together, because we didn’t even know how to put it together and they were scared I was going to break it. So every day I would just open it and look at it, for a week, every day. And then …

Can you remember holding it for the first time?

Ja, I was so excited when my teacher showed me. And then I went straight back home after my first lesson and played for, like, two hours. And then, after that, I just fell in love with it. I was wondering, afterwards, whether sort of looking at the flute for a long time, and waiting for it was instrumental in my enthusiasm. You know, that might be a good teaching technique.

Why did you go and study engineering, then? Because it sounds as if music was the thing? Always?

Ja, it was. I always … I did love maths … My two talents are music and maths.

Ja, they often say that they go together.

They say so, ja. So in my case I did love maths, and I loved puzzles, figuring things out. But music was my first love. But when I left school, I wanted to go and study music, but we didn’t have money to go and study. But I could get a bursary to study engineering, so I decided to study engineering, because that was my only option, or not go to university. And I enjoyed studying engineering as well, and I just kept on playing the flute. I thought, well, I’m studying engineering, I’ll just keep on playing the flute, and that’s what I did. I was very active, playing every day.

You couldn’t have had much free time, because engineering is a fulltime job.

It was very strenuous, but engineering was quite easy for me, so I didn’t do that much studying. I did quite a bit of partying as well, so I managed to find lots of time to play. I also enjoyed playing table tennis – I played … I started the university table tennis club, so, you know … I was very busy enjoying all aspects. And I think those things rub off on each other. I think doing engineering has helped me in my music career, and I think playing sports makes you a more coherent being, and I think that’s also helped my musical career.

How did engineering help or support the music?

Well, much later, the business sense and the logic … Because these days in the music industry, you can’t just be a musician. You’re a business person, looking after your music business. And that’s more than 50% of the job, so you actually need those business skills and logical thinking skills.

So you had your own engineering company at one point?

Yes, so I had to go and work back my bursary in Witbank on the coal mines, in that centre of creative activity! I didn’t enjoy Witbank very much at the time, because there was not even one movie theatre … So I was really wanting to get away from Witbank, so I started my own engineering business as soon as I could, because also working on the mines, I left home at five. The bus picked me up and at training … Engineering training, and spend the whole day underground and come back tired, and by then I started a young family, and I just didn’t have time to play the flute. So I started to … I thought let me start my own company, and that will allow me to have more control over my time … So that’s what I did. So that was a big decision, one that I agonised over, because it was quite risky … But I managed to get a contract, and for a while I worked in a military band as well, and that was sort of a transition, earned money both in the military band and running my own company, and that allowed me …

So for a person, when you start that entrepreneurial enterprise … Build a bridge?

Yes, that’s what I did. So I had ,a half-day steady income, which covered all my costs. But I did leave the engineering before I finished my bursary, paying back my bursary. So I had a lot of money to pay back, and at that stage I decided why I really wanted to go and study the flute overseas. So I thought let me make a quick fortune …

How does one do that?

So while I started my engineering business, I thought, well, I’m going to invest on the stock market and I asked my uncle, who was an expert on the stock market … He had done very well up to that stage …

Oh dear, I know where this is going.

So I asked him for advice, I went to all the banks I could, and being a graduate and an engineer I could get a significant amount of loans. And I invested it all on the stock exchange, but my timing was dreadfully wrong, because that was three months before Black Monday in ’87, in October. And the markets crashed, and I lost 90% of what I had loaned …

How did you come back?

And after that the interest rates went up to 23% … So I had to pay back all that money, that huge interest rate, and I just really worked very hard, and rented a house … We stayed, me and my family, my wife and my kids stayed in the lounge – we rented out all the rooms in the house because we couldn’t afford rent. And so it was a really tough period.

She couldn’t have been impressed?

No, she wasn’t. I wasn’t either. But you know, we managed. And it took me about four years of very hard work to pay back all the money. I didn’t want to declare myself bankrupt, because I just thought it was unethical if I could possibly make back, earn back the money. It would have been an easier way to just declare myself bankrupt and make a fresh start …

Yes, walk away …

But I didn’t want to do that, because I felt I was able to pay it back. Kill myself to do it, for many years, but I managed to do it and then soon after that my engineering business started to prosper, and I took summers off … The European summers and American summers and travelled overseas to have master classes with the world’s best teachers.

It didn’t cost quite as much in rand terms as it would now, because the rand was so much stronger then.

The rand was three to one at that stage.

So you kept your enthusiasm for the music … You kept that alive, because I think that kind of debt can sometimes weigh you down so that you can see nothing else.

Ja, for a while I had to practice very little. I’d put the milk on the stove for my breakfast cereal, pick up the flute and as soon as the milk’s hot, that’s it. That’s my flute playing for the day. But I never stopped. Even those three minutes, and that’s what I would say is my speciality – it’s inching forward. I’m very good at that – it takes a long time, but you just make a little bit … And I know we’re talking about big changes, but I believe the most powerful tool for me is making small changes. And that’s what kept me going … Those three minutes a day of flute playing kept me going and stopped me from like starting over, and just keep going. And even in my mind as well … Because you dream about it, if you do something, you dream about it at night and it grows, so it’s not just those three minutes that you do.

Ja, it affects the rest of the day.

Exactly.

Tell me about creating your first album … Colours? That took a number of years?

Yes, it took a long time, because from the engineering I wanted to, after a few years of doing engineering, I decided let me do this change over to fulltime musician, and I just went all out and ran out of money after nine months. And I had to go back to engineering and then after another four years I did the same thing again, and ran out of money again and back to engineering … For many years, because having a small family, my first priority was the kids. So I wanted to look after them properly, and they were expensive to look after. And I didn’t want to travel as well, I didn’t want to be away from home, so that limited my musical scope of what I could do to earn money. And then finally I made that transition when my son left school, so it took twenty years. My son left school, my daughter finished university and I paid off my house, I paid their studies and I tried to make … And this time it was more possible to make the transition. So I then set about to finally follow my passion and spent years making this first album. And I think this first album often is a really good album because it’s actually not just a few years, it’s a lifetime of musical experiences that you put into one album. So I put everything into that album, and …

What struck me when I listen to parts of it, is you’re an Afrikaans boy from Linden, but there are so many other influences in it. How did that come about?

Well, yes … When I was a young boy, there was only classical music … I think … In our house, only classical music, except for a Miriam Makeba album, which I loved. But when my mom went to work, she worked half days … The lady who looked after me played only African music … So I was really under the … I loved it. I loved the beat and the groove. So that stayed with me, and that sort of became a curiosity … I’m very curious about all kinds of different cultures and I’m enamoured by roots music from all over the world, music that survived centuries and that’s been passed on from generation to generation. That influence is something really special … I do love classical music, that’s how I played most of my life. But I’ve got all these other interests.

How did you make the connections with the musicians that you involved?

Well, when I started making my first album, I found Mauritz Lotz – he is a guitarist-producer … So he helped me produce, but at that stage I was sponsoring an African dance class. It was at the Brixton recreation centre, and I made sure that David Matamela, a dancer there, was teaching every day. He was the guy who choreographed African Footprint, and I would go to that African dance class every morning and stand in the back of the class and try and learn some steps and get into the vibe, and then I met some dancers there that weren’t musicians, but they were actually great, natural musicians. So we started jamming and I invited them to my house, we started making some music and I was also at that stage getting into yoga and my guitarist and my yoga teacher is the same person. And neither of us had ever improvised anything, we were both classically based. And we thought well, why don’t we try together to improvise something, because we’re both so clueless, that we won’t be embarrassed. You know, because I think that’s for a classical musician, that’s the biggest thing is you try something that sounds really bad, and you’re so embarrassed that you can’t do this, that you don’t want to do it again. So we were so comfortable with each other, that …

Go into YouTube and Google “dual” … Did that flow out of that?

Ja, that’s that, ja.

It’s fantastic!

So we started improvising and most of it was really bad, but every now and then we’d hit a sweet spot when something sounded pretty good. So we would just record and carry on we’d hit another sweet spot and we recorded that, and we eventually put those sweet spots together, and that became a song. And that’s how easy it was for us, and that became most of that first album.

There’s such a lovely element of playfulness in all of this, that it sounds as if it wasn’t really hard work and you were doing this thing, but you were also just enjoying yourselves?

Yes, we were just playing, experimenting, venturing into the unknown – for us – an unknown world. I didn’t do a course in improvisation or, so I think what we did was kind of fresh, because it was just … It was … We didn’t follow any formula or we weren’t taught how to improvise, so we didn’t realise at the time, but those songs … I repeated some of those songs and did different versions later on, and some of those songs that we’ve just started with, like my first song I ever wrote found its way on Winds of Samsara, which won the Grammy … So we actually had quite a magical period there, that we didn’t know … We didn’t realise magic was happening. We just felt like we were just playing around and experimenting.

What was it like to hold it in your hand? And here’s your first … Was it still a CD then, or did it exist digitally?

No, it was a CD. I was very proud of it. When we finished it, I still wasn’t happy and I wanted to have it mixed by the best person in the world. So I sort of thought who is the best person in the world that I would like to mix this. And at that stage, Norah Jones’s big album had just won eight Grammies and I fell asleep to that music every day, and I looked and I said, well, who mixed this? And it was an LA based musician, engineer, Husky Höskulds from … He’s an Icelander who lived in … So I sent him the album and thought he’d probably get so many requests that he probably won’t even … He will File 13 it, but I got an email back, saying: “I love the music, I love the experimental nature, I like the freshness…”

That must have been amazing!

That was amazing, ja. And he said it’s already so well mixed, you actually don’t need anybody to mix it. So I said ‘no, I want you to mix it’. So he agreed, and I went over to LA and worked with him, and some of the songs we couldn’t get a better result in what we had. But the songs that I wasn’t happy with, we could.

That says a lot about the South African musical standards?

South African musical standards really are amazing, that’s what I discovered over the years. I’m a Grammy voting member and I get sent a lot of albums to vote on, and I think South Africa is absolutely world class. People don’t realise it, here we’ve got this tendency to say: “Well, this is just us.” But we really have world class musicians, world class music, but we don’t do enough business wise to get it heard. But ja, so we finished that album and once finished, I sent it to the big major labels, expecting them … Because I thought it was an amazing album … Expecting them to fall over their feet, to release this album … And none of them would even listen to it. There was one where we could get an appointment, the others just said sorry. And the one we did get an appointment with, when we walked in there, said: “Ja … Hmmm … You know, it’s nice, but it’s not really our thing.” And we saw that the CD was on his desk, still in its wrapping. So he hadn’t listened to it. Nobody would even listen to it. Because they go: “Hmmm, we don’t … Flute album? No.” And I was already in my fourties, and it was a difficult time, because I’m thinking nobody seems to be wanting to hear a flute album. I’ve lost all of my youthful sex appeal that could have helped … So then we took it to the independent record labels, and they also weren’t interested and we eventually found someone who came, and we could sort of combine and self-release.

And how did it sell?

It sold pretty well. It got fantastic reviews … I still remember in The Citizen, it was my album and then Santana’s album. Santana is eight out of ten, and me, I’m nine out of ten.

Aitsa!

I still … That was my first review, and I was really grateful for the recognition.

I’m sure you had that framed against the wall?

Ja, so that album was nominated for a Sama in that year, so things started to happen. People started to take note.

And then, Samsara, with which you would go on to win the Grammy? How did the connection with Indian music come about?

Well, you know, I used to date a girl from India, and she introduced me, as well as Tholsi, my manager is an Indian. They introduced me to the Bollywood music, and the Indian music, and it’s just music that I had been listening to for a long time, so when I … My first two albums are entered for Grammies, and even though I thought they were great, they got absolutely no attention in the US. And then I realised what you have to do, is you have to go and tour there and do a lot of marketing on top of having a great musical album.

Because you have to have an awareness.

Ja, because people don’t know that there’s a whole, huge amount of voting members. I think 20 … 12 000 voting members, all musicians. That’s how the Grammy’s work. You get voted by your peers. But if there’s 22 000 entries every year …

So you can’t listen to everything.

You can’t listen … If you haven’t done some touring, if there’s not awareness – even if you have a great album – you’re not going to get there. But part of the … One of the fringe benefits of being part of this whole Grammy process, is I was listening to a lot of other music, and other people were listening to my music, and Ricky Kej from Bangalore had also just also entered his album into the Grammy process, and I heard his music and he heard my music and he sent me an email saying: “I really like your flute playing, would you like to add flute to this track?” And he sent me this track and it was mind-blowingly good. It just moved me, and I thought well, this guy I really have to impress, because he’s amazing. So I spent a lot of time sending him something really nice back, and he loved it, and then we started talking about South Africa and India and Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi and we realised that Mahatma Gandhi spent 20 years of his life in South Africa and that he started his concepts of peaceful resistance over here, and Mandela was very influenced by that. So we had that conversation and I wrote a song for Madiba, and he wrote a song for Mahatma Gandhi and we started working together and when we looked again, we had a whole album.

And what was it like when they informed you that you’ve won?

Well, first it was the nomination. My dream was to get a nomination.

So one enters, and then there’s a kind of short list, and that’s the nominations.

You enter, and then there’s a short list of … First there’s a short list of a few hundred, and then people vote. And then they choose five.

Ah.

And to get to that … The top five in the world, really. Because the Grammy is really, is a worldwide … Was just a dream that I never knew could happen. So to get to that nomination, for me, that was the big thing. It was announced, and I was just so grateful … And then we went to the Grammies, and our fellow nominees had … I think … 36 previous nominations … This was our first nomination! And we didn’t think we had a chance, we were just grateful to be there. But we’ve done really well in sales. We were number 1 on the Billboard charts in the New Age category, which in which that album was, and we were number 1 on the radio charts, and because, by then …

In the US?

In the US. By then we’d figured it out. I was touring there, I played Carnegie Hall that year, I played the Grammy Museum in LA and we had been touring the States. It was a long … It was a long time coming, you know. We spent the previous six years getting started in the States, going over regularly, playing, finding out how things work over there, you know. You have to know the radio promoters, and which ones will just rip you off and which one will actually give you some value, and all those things. And we figured it out, so finally things came together.

So you really put in the 10 000 hours?

Ja, many, many more than 10 000.

And I think the underlying message is ‘do not give up’? It’s not no, it means next. Do the next thing, try the next thing?

Absolutely.

I think many people feel, more than think that it either happens, or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t happen, you forget about your dream and you walk away and you go and work in Pizzaland or something. But I’m hearing you saying: “It’s graft. You put one foot in front of the other and start again tomorrow morning, and phone the next person.”

Ja, no that’s very much … That’s what playing a music instrument teaches you. And I found playing a musical instrument has a profound effect on you, because when you play the flute or any instrument and you can’t do something, you practice until you can do it. So when you can’t do it, the way of thinking is: “Oh no, I can’t do it today, but I’ll just patiently work at it.” And then you see oh, well,  a week later, a month later, a year later, ja, I can do it. And that’s such a big life lesson, because in life I’ve found … Even in my engineering company … I ended up employing musicians, because they understood this. While many other people did not understand, they try something, they can’t do it and go well, I can’t do it. And that’s the end of it. So I think music teaches you … Sport teaches you that as well. Because an athlete breaks 12 seconds for the 100 metres, and he can’t do any better and he practices and then he breaks 11 seconds and …

It also teaches you to accept input from other people without receiving criticism. If your sports trainer says you’re placing your hand the wrong way, you don’t feel: “Oh, he doesn’t like me.”

Ja, exactly. And then your teacher tells you things and you learn to look for how to do things – how to do things well. You research it, you don’t depend only on your teacher, you go looking for other teachers and other advice, experimenting. And I think it’s a really big life lesson.

So now you have another entry in the Grammy’s for 2015, and you promised to play us something?

Yes, well I actually entered the next album, Love Language, into it last year, and this time it was in the contemporary instrumental category, which is a more competitive category than the New Age because all the instrumentalists in the world are up for it. All guitarists, all pianists, all sax players, all violin players … All going for that one award. So then we got to the top five, so that was really …

When was that announced?

That was announced in December last year, and then we went to the Grammy’s again in February, but this time I didn’t win it. There’s Snarky Puppy, a great band, a fourty piece band that collaborated with the Metropole Orkest, which is a Dutch … The biggest professional orchestra in the world, and they have been nominate 16 times before. So they were just too good, and they had a great album, so I was very happy to lose to them. I was just very happy to be mentioned in the same breath.

And the song that you said you were going to play … You say there’s a back story to it?

Yes, this is a song that I wrote for Madiba. It’s called “A Long Road” and it describes his life with the colours of the flute. So it starts with him growing up in rural Transkei, where he is very close to nature and spends some time herding cattle. When I was writing the song I was thinking about him sitting by his cattle, listening to the beautiful sounds of nature, which even there must have been tinged with a touch of sadness, showing what was to come in his life. And then, in the next section, he moves to the city and the peacefulness of nature makes space for the hustle and bustle of city life, and the train of events that would take control of his life. And in this section I use all kinds of extended techniques to show those moments. And in the last section he retires, finally has time to be peaceful again and spend with his family, and the piece ends on an unfinished note, showing that even though his life is over, his memory and influence will carry on and sustain us far into the future.

Will you play some for us, please?

Of course.

[Wouter plays the flute]

Thank you, thank you so much for that! Sjoe. What’s the album called?

The album is “Love Language” and the song is called “The Long Road”.

Oh! It’s beautiful.

Thank you.

On a more personal note, you’ve talked about your children and that they had a practical impact on your life, but what about the emotional impact? How did they change you?

Well, you know … Things changed completely. I was very young at the time, but I was just so much in awe of this new life, and beautiful beings – a daughter and a son. And I just thought that’s my first priority and I have to look after them first before anything else. And that’s why I waited so long to follow my musical passions. I still kept on while they were growing up, but I was a very involved dad – I was the taxi mom, driving them everywhere, spending lots of time with them. And ja … So it was my priority to look after them and do the engineering as well, to make that possible.

They say adults don’t make children; Children make adults.

Ja.

You have to take that responsibility.

Ja, exactly.

Are you still close?

We’re very close. We spend a lot of time together and they’re my friends now. Because I was a young father and I go dancing often, I do salsa with my daughter, so we go out a lot and we have a lot of dinners together and I have a granddaughter as well now – a two-year-old, Chai – she’s the love of my life, at the moment.

Can you remember seeing her for the first time?

Yes, she’s just … I was there with my two children’s births and I remember holding them, I remember holding little Chai as well, and it’s such a magical moment when that happens.

Ja, we can’t believe that we grew … All of us … Out of that!

Ja, it’s just so special just to see a child grow and to be part of it and just giving them as much love … I was actually a very inexperienced and totally clueless parent. We didn’t … I’m watching my son and his wife now, how good they are and how they’ve researched everything. And they have the internet and they know so much about every step of the development and they’re so good with all the food and the oils and the vit … You know, all the fruits and veggies and exactly … They know exactly what to do, and I was so clueless. But the one thing I had was a lot of love for the kids. I thought my goal was to teach any child two things in my view that are very important. The one was how to be loving, and the other one is how to be responsible and not blame everything, when things go wrong in the world and you believe you’re a victim of circumstances – that kind of attitude, I think, is not healthy for anybody to have. So that was my two things I tried to teach them, and they’re both very loving and my son’s very responsible because he’s got a little baby. And my daughter is a free spirit, she … But ja, I’m still in awe of them.

And a home? You travel so much. What’s the best thing about coming home?

The people here. The people here, and the spirit. People are extremely friendly and welcoming. I think South Africa is the only country in the world where the passport official smiles at you.

And says: “Hello, how are you?”

Ja! I haven’t actually seen it anywhere else in the world. I’ve travelled many, many places and it’s a very serious process when you go through the passport … And you always feel a little bit uncomfortable. You’re like: “What are they going to do now?” But in South Africa they smile, having a great time. The passport officials are having the time of their life – it looks like it, anyway! Welcoming all these people, and I think it’s a beautifully South African thing.

And your physical home? What’s the best thing? When you look for a home, what do you look for? Light? Space? Trees?

For me, things have to be light. I get depressed if there’s too much darkness, so even at night I’ve got all the lights on. But ja, I designed my house in Randburg. At the time I thought the kids were going to go to school just around the corner and I wanted to have a tennis court, because I love playing tennis. There was only one street that had enough space, so I put a little letter in every post-box, ‘if you want to sell your house’. And someone responded and I bought the house and designed a whole lounge, dining room area that doubles as a performance space, and a lot of light. A lot of windows and place for a studio and that kind of thing. So that’s my home. And for me, light … Sort of a friendly place. So that’s what I’m into.

And when you … How often have you moved? How long have you had that house?

Well, that house I’ve had for a very long time, because I’m allergic to moving. I remember moving, I think, 17 times in five years, or something at some stage with my life changing so often, and since then I’ve really tried not to move at all. And this is the one time where I draw the line … I love my friends, but I will not help them move! I’ve just done it too many times.

Wouter, thank you so much for visiting and for that very special gift of your music.

Thank you so much.

And all of the very, very best.

Thanks for having me.

Until next time. Good luck. Enjoy life.

  • This interview first appeared on the Change Exchange, an online platform by BrightRock, provider of the first-ever life insurance that changes as your life changes. The opinions expressed in in it don’t necessarily reflect the views of BrightRock.
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