From Dad's Taxi to Grammy glory: Wouter Kellerman's transformative journey to success

Wouter Kellerman at the 29th annual South African Music Awards (SAMA) at SunBet Arena on November 18, 2023 in Pretoria, South Africa. The awards celebrate and honour exceptional and outstanding artists in different genres of music. (Photo by Gallo Images/Oupa Bopape)

By Diana Neille

21 Feb 2025

Having won his third Grammy Award in early February (along with five previous nominations and nine South African Music Awards, among many other accolades), one would assume Wouter Kellerman to be a lifelong music professional. As it turns out, he’s only been doing this gig full time since the age of 44.

With his two kids having finished school and out of the house, in 2005 Kellerman stopped playing Dad’s Taxi and started playing the flute for more than just one hour a day (a practice he says he’s kept up religiously since childhood). He quit his job as an electrical engineer and started making music for a living. He has barely taken a day off from composing, playing or producing new — and New Age — music since.

Earlier this month he and his best friend-slash-business partner, Tholsi Pillay, took a well-earned break to travel to Los Angeles, for the umpteenth time in 10 years: On February 2, Kellerman won the Grammy for Best New Age, Ambient or Chant Album — titled “Triveni” — alongside his Indian-American and Japanese collaborators, singer Chandrika Tandon and cellist Eru Matsumoto.

“It’s so important to take a moment to appreciate and celebrate the music that we all make,” said Kellerman. “I have to remind myself to do that — I tend to just move on to the next thing. And I think it’s really important to just take a moment and enjoy.”

Wouter Kellerman at a special screening of The Last Ranger at Montecasino on 12 February 2025 in Johannesburg, South Africa. The film has been nominated for best live-action short film at the Academy Awards, which take place in Los Angeles on 3 March. (Photo: Gallo Images / Oupa Bopape)

Triveni, Kellerman’s eighth album, was a “huge amount of work” as a collaborative endeavour between three creatives from three different parts of the world, with three unique sensibilities. As members of the Recording Academy, a 13,000-strong group of music industry professionals from around the world who are responsible for choosing each year’s Grammy winners, Kellerman, Tandon and Matsumoto met through the selection and nomination process. Over the past decade, Kellerman and Tandon would trade their music back and forth. Because the academy has so many members scattered across the globe — and upwards of 20,000 submissions each year to consider — it becomes the nominees’ task to ensure that as many of their peers as possible find out about and listen to their music before they vote.

This can be a costly and time-consuming process. But for the collaborators of Triveni, it turned out to be a strategic and creatively satisfying one, too.

“Matsumoto and I were both guests on a classical music album that won a Grammy three years ago,” said Kellerman. “She approached me to make an album of healing music… I loved the idea and the first person I thought of was (Tandon), because she’s also in that range.

“The music that you hear in a film when something really bad is about to happen? This music is the opposite of that,” Kellerman said. “We have all been making positive expressions in music all our lives; sending good energy into the world.”

The three agreed to make the music available for a scientific research study, and met in New York to begin setting the groundwork for the album. From there, they returned to their studios back home and continued working remotely on their contributions, collaborating with South African co-producers Wessel van Rensburg and Mauritz Lotz; going back and forth online to refine and fill out each track.

“It’s been a long and difficult process at times, but you know, nothing worthwhile really happens without encountering some difficult spots,” said Kellerman. “In the end we were all exquisitely happy with the product.”

The sum of many parts

Growing up during apartheid, Kellerman was the only boy in his school to take up a musical instrument. He began playing the flute at age 10, when all his peers were playing rugby and cricket. There again, he chafed against convention, taking up table tennis instead — and eventually became the top player in his university’s league.

Not from a family of means, Kellerman’s only route to varsity was an engineering bursary, which set him on the path of a white collar career, although he would hold occasional concerts, and travel once a year for masterclasses. As a single working dad with custody of his son and daughter, he developed his own idiosyncratic ways of infusing his creative passions into his life.

Fascinated by the traditional relationship between dance and music performance in cultures around the world (with the exception, ironically, of his own), he took up salsa and learnt about pan-African styles, Argentinian tango, flamenco and Celtic root music.

Wouter Kellerman at the 29th annual South African Music Awards (Samas) at SunBet Arena on 18 November 2023 in Pretoria, South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images / Oupa Bopape)

In the early 2000s, after dropping his daughter off a few times at tap classes with the renowned choreographer David Matamela, Kellerman soon found himself out on the boards, holding his own among a bunch of teenage girls.

“I was the only parent taking the class,” Kellerman laughed.

“I believe dance and music belong together. They weren’t separate things before — people danced while they sang and sang while they danced through the centuries,” he said.

Later, when Matamela’s studio unexpectedly closed, Kellerman paid for him to give daily dance classes free of charge to whomever wanted to learn, attending regularly himself. Matamela’s musically percussive instruction style would eventually feature on one of Kellerman’s albums, and the flautist would include dancers from the studio in his shows.

Once he began to gain acclaim for his music, Kellerman’s love of collaboration also began to translate into ever more success for the careers of others, too. When his usual partners at the Soweto Gospel Choir were unavailable for a corporate gig in 2018, Kellerman and Pillay cast about for another collective to book. They happened upon a group of young singers from a rural Limpopo childcare community, called The Ndlovu Youth Choir. After the gig, Kellerman and the choir members collaborated on a music video that went viral the following year, prompting a call from the producers at America’s Got Talent.

The gifted youngsters went all the way to the finals, becoming household names in South Africa and beyond in the process, and cementing their careers. In 2023, the same formula worked for the Mzansi Youth Choir, who have also gone on to build international careers as a collective.

For Kellerman, it’s all part of the fabric of the second, predestined half of a very productive life that began when he was 10.

“The flute is a collaborative instrument. You need accompaniment. You need a piano, and it helps to have some vocals on your music, because people relate to vocals. So collaboration is just a natural thing for me. I just love the differences, the richness we have in South Africa. To collaborate with these different cultures and sounds — here and around the world — is just the best.” DM

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The sum of many parts