First published in the Daily Maverick on 3 February 2024.
by Prof Tinyiko Maluleke, VC and Principal of TUT
South African flautist Wouter Kellerman, with Eru Matsumoto and Chandrika Tandon, won a Grammy for their album, Triveni, in the Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album category early on Monday morning SA time. Kellerman has won two previous Grammys, in 2023 with Zakes Bantwini and Nomcebo Zikode, and in 2015 with Ricky Kej.
I hear the wind among the trees,
Playing celestial symphonies,
I see the branches downward bent,
Like keys of some great instrument.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – A Day of Sunshine

Prof Tinyiko Maluleke, Vice-Chancellor and Principal with tripple
Grammy Award winner, Dr Wouter Kellerman.
From his childhood, flautist and alumnus of the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) Wouter Kellerman was awake to the melodies that were blowing in the wind, whistling through the tallest trees, amplified across the valleys, whirling in the fields, echoing around the hills of Johannesburg, invoking the primordial Winds of Samsara.
That is how Kellerman acquired the windy melody that is permanently lodged between his ears – causing him to whistle, hum a tune or break into a mini dance at the slightest provocation.
The musical diet of the Kellerman home in Randburg was as carefully curated as was the nutritional diet. The former consisted of works by the likes of Bach, Boulanger, Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi, De la Guerre, Schumann and Puccini.
And yet, on the periphery of the Kellermans’ classical music collection, there was one solitary Miriam Makeba album. In it was to be found the Caribbean fairy-tale track titled Naughty Little Flea, originally made famous by Jamaican folk musician Norman Byfield Thomas, aka “Lord Flea”.
The Miriam Makeba cover of the song is rivetingly delivered in simulated Jamaican creole, peppered with isiXhosa invocations and incantations: “Where did da naughty little flea go? Nobody know, nobody know”, she sang the song about a small flea that troubled a big dog.
Young Wouter was so taken with the song, he listened to it over and over again.
A boy in pursuit of a flute
One day when Wouter was 10, his father, Pieter van Ellewee Kellerman, and his mother, Susanna Petronella Kellerman (nee Greeff), took him and his siblings to a big symphony concert. The kids were implored to observe and listen with the utmost care so that by the end of the concert each could choose one instrument they wished to learn to play.
Whereas most of the wind instruments were pointed towards the front, there was a tiny, shiny little instrument which pointed sideways – the flute. Wouter thought the small wind instrument was cool and different, so he chose it. His brother Pieter chose the clarinet.
Unable to afford a flute at that time, but eager to fulfil their promise, Wouter’s parents hired one. Nor could they afford to send Wouter to the flute-teaching mecca of the classical music world at that time, namely, the famed Conservatoire de Paris.
So, they engaged a local part-time flute teacher from the Randburg Music Centre. Thus began Wouter Kellerman’s lifelong relationship with an instrument with which he has since become an internationally acclaimed virtuoso – across several musical genres.
While pursuing the maths and science stream of subjects at high school, Kellerman also did music. He was better at maths (in which he obtained a distinction in matric) than he was in music. He was even better at table tennis. And yet, the flute remained the constant love of his life – an instrument he practised with several times per day.
The flute amid competing priorities
One of the great lessons imparted by a teacher to his debating team of students in the 2007 film The Great Debaters was captured in the words, “We do what we got to do so we can do what we want to do.”
Accordingly, before he could “do” the flute, Kellerman had to complete an electrical engineering degree at the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU, now called the University of Johannesburg, UJ) thanks to an Anglo American bursary.
While studying engineering at UJ, Kellerman also became an extracurricular flute teacher at the university, a member of the Junior SABC Symphony Orchestra, a zealous Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) youth evangelist on the streets of Hillbrow, an unsuccessful long-distance music student at Unisa and an avid Afrikaans folk music dancer over the weekends.
Unfortunately, his DRC dominees considered the young man’s Saturday night sokkie dancing escapades unholy, so they excommunicated him.
And yet, all through these Evita Peron-like “wild days” of his “mad existence”, Kellerman’s flute was always by his side – literally. By the age of 22, at the height of his student years, Kellerman was playing the principal flute, sometimes as a soloist, in such symphony orchestras as the National Youth Orchestra, the SABC Symphony Orchestra, the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra and the Air Force Band.
But alas, all these had to be paused.
Kellerman had to be apprenticed and work as a mining electrical engineer for the Anglo American coal mines at eMalahleni (formerly Witbank) – a place once described by Hugh Masekela as a “one-street, redneck, right-wing Afrikaner town, surrounded by coal mines and coal trains and endless carriages”.
Soon, Kellerman’s neglected flute called him from eMalahleni and sent him back to Gauteng. A year later, Kellerman resigned from the mines and signed up for a more flexible job in the Military Medical Services Band in Pretoria. Thus was Kellerman reunited with his flute.
Opportunities to attend flute masterclasses with seasoned and celebrated flautists in Europe and the US began to open up. Soon enough, Kellerman was himself inviting such flute teaching greats as Trevor Wye and William Bennett to hold flute masterclasses in South Africa. Some of these were held in Kellerman’s living room.
But the competition for his time and attention was intensifying. By the time Kellerman went to work in eMalahleni, he was a young father of two kids – his daughter Nicollete, and his son, Ewoudt. More than ever before, he needed a steady job to help him put bread on the table.
But he never let go of his flute.
A professional flautist is born
Once his children went to tertiary institutions, Kellerman revived his dream of freeing himself and his flute from the constraints of classical music so that he could become a full-time jazz and world music flautist.
Inspired by Norah Jones’ 2002 double Grammy Award-winning album, Come Away with Me, Wouter Kellerman released his first album, Colour, in 2007. But not before he was rejected by all the major South African music labels – Universal, Sony, Gallo and so on.
“Wouter, we love your music, we think you are amazing, but it’s just not our thing,” said one music label executive, memorably.
A little-known music company called Mastermax took a chance and published Kellerman’s first album. The reviews were raves, the sales took off and the accolades started pouring in.
After 11 albums, one honorary doctorate from the Tshwane University of Technology, five Grammy nominations, three Grammy wins, 13 Sama nominations, nine Sama wins and having performed on every continent including at the closing ceremony of the 2010 Fifa World Cup, Wouter Kellerman’s name will be written in gold among the musical greats of Africa and the world.
At the 2025 Grammy Awards on Sunday, 2 February 2025 – Monday, 3 February in South Africa – his album Triveni, in collaboration with phenomenal Indian artist and businesswoman Chandrika Tandon and Japanese cellist Eru Matsumoto, won the Grammy in the category New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album.
Having opened with a reference to the Caribbean fairy-tale about a naughty little flea that drove a big dog crazy, Kellerman’s flute-based music is evocative of the legendary tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who used the melodies of his woodwind pipe to lure pestilential rats from his village.
May the sounds of Kellerman’s flute help rid us of the plague of nihilistic despair that often threatens to swallow up our world without a trace. May Kellerman’s music become a fountain from which we shall continue to find hope and healing in a world torn apart by greed, bigotry, violence and environmental degradation.

Dr Wouter Kellerman