Three years ago, flautist Wouter Kellerman exploded on to the South African world music scene in a burst of musical colour and texture. His first album, Colour, was nominated for a South African Music Award (Sama) for Best Instrumental Album in 2008. The album’s DVD – Kellerman Colour Live – won the 2010 Sama for Best Jazz/Instrumental/Popular Classical DVD. Kellerman has been travelling the world with his flutes and multi-layered sound. This year he has performed at the opening ceremony of the international Midem conference in France and at the closing ceremony of the Fifa World Cup. When asked what it is about his music that has garnered him such a diverse, multicultural fanbase, Kellerman put it down to two things; his influences and the flute. “I think the fact that I’m influenced by such a wide range of different things makes my music accessible to many people. There is Irish influence as well as Latin and African.”

But it is the flute that Kellerman believes attracts people to his music – it isn’t an instrument commonly played outside of the classical music genre. “It is very unlikely for a flautist to play at a World Cup, isn’t it?” he points out. “I think people relate to the flute because it is played by breathing and everyone can do that. “My kind of flute playing is not a classic style, where you try and hide the breath. You have to hear me breath. I am a live musician. I like people to hear the breath when I play and to hear the air in the notes. I am very particular about that in my live concerts and in my recordings.” One could consider Kellerman a collector of sounds. He celebrates diversity and experiments with a wide range of influences and sounds. Even the sound of the Joburg hadedas – which he loves – has found its way into his music.

Colour was really the solo result of these  sound experiments. Kellerman’s new album, Two Voices, takes his diversity of ideas one step further, as he collaborates on each piece of music with a different artist. “When I work with another artist, we start with a totally blank page. “We will just start playing and in that process we will hit on something that sounds good and then we will use that as the starting point for the piece,” Kellerman says “Or there might be something that I hear that really moves me and I know immediately that I have to do this song.” Kellerman has pulled many of the themes from his first album into the second and many of his original influences are still there. However, there is a much stronger African flavour, with some interesting collaborations with Senegal’s Lamine Sonko. “Every musician influences you and from every collaboration you learn something,” he says.