Guy Buttery's Orchestrations is decade-long journey into the heart of musical innovation

Musician Guy Buttery.

15 Mar 2025

The globally admired South African’s latest album, Orchestrations, has been a long 12 years in the making and brings a new perspective to his masterful compositions.

Guy Buttery is in love. Perhaps always has been. But it is something calmer, deeper and more vitally rooted – something many South Africans share: a deepest connection, at once molecular and spiritual, to the soil of our corner of this rich continent.

Buttery’s connection is to KwaZulu-Natal. A frequent globe-trotter — his popularity means that he is often en route to Europe, India, America and beyond to mesmerise audiences with his sophisticated, melodically verdant guitar playing — he always returns to his heartland.

A widely celebrated — and, more tellingly, much beloved — instrumentalist, Buttery is first and foremost a disciple of the mysteries of music. Often cited as a virtuoso, Buttery, in his approach to composition, is focused on the entwined muses of rhythm and melody rather than on showcasing his sometimes alarming technical prowess.

Instrumentalist Guy Buttery is in a class of his own. (Photo: Julia Franco)

Buttery unveiled a much-anticipated and radical new album, Orchestrations, on 20 February 2025. Arranged for orchestra by the multitalented UK-based Chris Letcher, the album is a masterclass in exploding compositions into new perspectives. A robust 12 years in the making, its conception was sparked when Buttery approached Letcher about arranging three of his songs for classical ensemble, to debut at the National Arts Festival in 2012.

Asked about highlights in the rehearsal and recording process for Orchestrations, Letcher recalls: “I remember rehearsing one early version of the music with a string quartet in Bloem for some reason, and just feeling really excited that the whole thing was working — the quartet really got the whole idea and it was amazing to hear Guy’s guitar and the string players transformed into a complex, living, grooving musical thing.

“We’d mocked the whole thing up so had an idea of how it should work, but hearing each player’s decades of experience, skill, personality, heart, etc, bring it all to life was a powerful experience.”

Painstakingly coaxed

Over the span of 12 years there are “dozens of hours” of arranged music from which the completed album was painstakingly coaxed, a new approach to creating an album for Buttery, whose compositions on the whole exist for interpretation and execution in the moment, and whose songs tend to be recorded in the same way.

Says Buttery: “This album is the complete opposite of One Morning in Gurgaon (2021) where the recording took just three hours, most of it first takes.”

Asked how much free rein he gave Letcher regarding the arrangements, Buttery says: “A lot. I respect and love Chris; he’s an absolute genius in my opinion. He sees music and breathes music in a very literal way — it’s quite amazing to witness.”

About how he came to be involved in the project and what it was like, Letcher said: “It was ages ago, but I think Guy, who I’ve been friends with for ages, asked me if I’d be up for arranging three songs for him to perform with the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra (KZNPO) in 2012.

Musician Guy Buttery's latest album Orchestrations has 17 guest artists. (Photo: Gillian Coetzee)

“We had collaborated on some other things before then, but this was definitely a bigger challenge — trying to figure out how to keep the huge beast of an orchestra in sync with Guy’s guitar, how to navigate shifting tempos and time signatures, and what to do with synchronising sections of music that had no discernible pulse. Mainly it was about working out how the orchestrations could add something to Guy’s already fully formed music and not squash the life out of it,” says Letcher.

“Guy’s music often contains multiple layers all operating at the same time, so exploding those layers out for additional instruments makes sense. His music also often feels like sections are based on improvisation. It was interesting to see how you could get that feeling of something spontaneous, instinctive, not entirely planned into written notation that had to be set down as instructions on a page for musicians to play.”

Delirious tension

In the album’s rendition of one of my favourite Buttery tracks, Werner meets Egberto in Manaus, the strings explode in rapid bursts seemingly a hair’s breadth before the beat, creating a delirious tension, with the royal Madala Kunene adding his storied voice to proceedings.

Recorded in several countries and featuring the KZNPO and the Gqeberha String Quartet, Orchestrations ropes in no less than 17 guest artists, among them Kaki King (New York City), Mudassir Khan (New Delhi), Julian Sartorius (Switzerland) and Pino Forastiere (Italy), along with a slew of stylistically distinct local artists like Derek Gripper, Louis Mhlanga and Julian Redpath.

An album drenched in nuanced revelations, with new intrigues and fresh detail emerging with each relistening, Orchestrations is a must-have for established fans and a splendorous introduction for newcomers.

A beautiful side-project that Guy has tied in with the album is the rehabilitation of a stretch of river in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. “It was something that revealed itself in the final steps of the making of the album. There’s a stretch of the river completely eaten away by bramble and debris and bugweed and other invasives in the area, literally strangled.”

After the removal of hundreds of logs from the river, and planting Stinkwood to stop the bramble returning, the project literally took root: “It’s the KZN Midlands, things just grow. I find the results pretty astounding – I was away for two weeks over December and I came back and noticed the place had grown like crazy. The river is flowing so beautifully [again]. I put a camera trap up and there are porcupines and otter and all kinds of mongoose and everything, genets and buck... It’s been really awesome and it’s an amazing project that I hope I can just keep doing forever.”

Visit guybuttery.bandcamp.com for the album and more on the future forest. DM

Mick Raubenheimer is a freelance arts writer.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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Painstakingly coaxed