Abel Selaocoe isn’t so much a cellist as a magician. The South African musician is on a neon-lit stage in Camden – lights, microphones, crowd. He starts to play and suddenly we’re in a forest – bird calls, twigs cracking underfoot, leaves rustling and rain starting to drip, drip. There’s no digital trickery. The birds are glinting harmonics, barely touching the string; the twigs burst in resonant mouth-percussion; leaves rustle as he caresses the wood of the cello, before raindrops scatter in a frenzy of plucked strings. It’s mesmerising, and a packed club is momentarily hypnotised.
A musical meditation or a roaring, rock-intense groove; a spontaneous audience singalong or a classical masterpiece: with Selaocoe, you never know what you’re going to get. The cellist’s 2022 debut Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae) – praised by critics but denied the No 1 spot on the official classical chart by straying too far from Western norms – melded suites and sonatas by Bach and Platti with South African and Tanzanian-influenced new tracks, asking a musical question with no certain answer. But Selaocoe’s follow-up, Hymns of Bantu, released last week, is ready to commit to a statement. “It’s more like a homecoming,” says Selaocoe, “than a searching for home.”
Selaocoe grew up in Sebokeng, a township just south of Johannesburg, and cellos weren’t exactly part of the furniture. So when at nine years old he brought one home – lent to him by a project in Soweto – it was met with some confusion by the close-knit community. “For a while everybody thought it was a guitar,” Selacoe says with a grin. “They just thought I played it in a very strange way!”
Twenty years on and Selaocoe has performed at the world’s major concert halls, released a critically acclaimed debut album and won prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society, Paul Hamlyn and Songlines awards, but nothing has really changed for an artist who describes himself as “definitely not a traditional musician”.
We’re living in a world of musical fusion. Afrobeats blends with R&B, country collides with pop, classical music flirts with everything from folk to rock and electro. But even against this increasingly blurred backdrop Selaocoe defies musical definition. He’s a cellist with a supple, expressive, walnut-sweet sound – a soloist who could have had a career touring the big concertos, but wanted something different.
“You can only write and perform what you feel is true,” he says. “I’m a product of all my influences; I wanted to bring everything together, all I’ve experienced, and create from that place.”
Attend a Selaocoe performance today and you’re as likely to hear him singing as playing, see him using his cello as percussion rather than a melody instrument. He still performs as a soloist with symphony orchestras, but more often now you’ll find Selaocoe playing his own music: a mix of classical and newly arranged, composed and improvised pieces performed by a combination of Western and African instruments – even the occasional home-made one. “We didn’t have any proper African drums,” he explains of his latest album recording, “but we found some plastic bins and filled them with water and just experimented.”
We’re speaking over Zoom. It’s a sub-zero day, but Selaocoe – “on daddy day-care duty” with his baby daughter, while his partner (a British violist) rehearses – is outdoors, keen to grasp whatever sunshine a UK winter can offer before hopping on a plane to New York for his own performances later today.
Selaocoe’s “guitar” wasn’t his first instrument – or his strangest. Growing up, his mother a domestic worker and his father a mechanic, he looked up to his big brother Sammy. It was the ambitious Sammy (now a professional bassoonist in South Africa) who first recognised the opportunities classical music offered, who travelled each Saturday to a specialist school in Soweto where children from the townships shared instruments and classes.
Before Selaocoe earned the rare privilege of his own cello, it was Sammy who drew four lines representing each of the cello’s four strings on a piece of paper, helping Abel to practise with the aid of a broom-handle “bow”.
Later, the two brothers would spend each Saturday crammed into a train so full that Selaocoe could barely fit his precious cello, forced to collapse the bridge supporting the strings and unscrew the metal spike at the bottom of the instrument each time. “People were so close together I’d have stabbed someone by accident! But we had an amazing time; we knew we were reaching for what we wanted.”
A scholarship to St John’s College – “Johannesburg’s Eton” – soon followed: a huge culture-shock for the 13-year-old. “It was a new world and a terrifying one. I didn’t really understand English at that time, and I had this sense of responsibility – representing my family’s future. All the other kids were so much more privileged; I remember my brother always reminding me: ‘Your mistakes cost so much more than theirs.’”
But it was a different story at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music. At 18, the “much more confident” Selaocoe started carving out his own musical identity. Surrounded by “a cacophony of cellists”, all keen to learn the same big concertos, he chose another path: writing and performing his own pieces.
It’s this music that dominates his second album. Rather than two worlds in dialogue, Selaocoe creates a third musical space, blurring and roughing up the edges to create a fluid new union. “I was trying to celebrate all the wonderful forms of prayer – to celebrate the idea that there’s a thread that binds everyone together,” says Selaocoe. “I wanted to take hymns that I’ve grown up with in South Africa and put them together with classical music and make them live in the same space – for it to feel like a natural habitat for both of them.”
The effect is disorienting, like dropping a Bach Cello Suite into a bowl of water and watching the colours run and swirl into new and unexpected patterns. But while some of the tracks are hymns in the traditional sense – the foot-stomping groove of first single “Emmanuele”, the gentler lilt of “Tsohle, Tsohle” – most are more oblique.
The connecting thread through it all is the idea of community – of collective, shared song. “You can sing a hymn on your own,” Selaocoe says, “but it doesn’t feel the same, you know?” It’s a theme that taps into the cellist’s upbringing: back in Sebokeng, nobody arrives or leaves home without somebody starting up a song. “Not if you’re just heading out to shops,” Selaocoe clarifies, “but long journeys or important ones. It’s our way of being thankful – a prayer, a blessing.”
A family singalong seems a long way from classical music’s professionalised perfection in the West – music treated with such respect that many of us don’t dare to touch it.
Selaocoe nods. “I think everyone should be made welcome to music. I’m a huge fan of amateur musicians: these are the people that do it for love. Sure, we have to spend time learning our craft, but music is something we all have access to. It’s like air – we don’t need to know the individual scientific components of it to breathe.”
While the UK offered Selaocoe the chance to prove himself on his own terms – “For the first time it was just about excellence rather than colour. If you’re excellent the door is open; come on in!” – it was a different story in South Africa, where welcome into this culturally elite art-form was far from a given. “Playing classical music in the township was highly unusual, almost a kind of protest: art for all! We rebelled against the idea that it wasn’t for us.”
At last count, only two per cent of the UK’s orchestral musicians were from an ethnic minority; only 4 per cent of music performed in concert halls worldwide is by minority composers, who receive only 6 per cent of classical commissions. What would Selaocoe’s approach be to move the dial?
“I always go back to the South African philosophy of ‘each one teach one’: the minute you become good at something you pass it on. I think professional black musicians have an individual responsibility to reach back and find others you can empower.”
Selaocoe’s new album seems like a turning point – a new statement of musical intent, and shift away from classical music as we know it. “It’s getting harder and harder,” he acknowledges, “to choose it above my own music. I tend not to play pieces because they are beautiful or great. I would like them to have social impact. That’s such an important direction for classical music. We need to be asking: why do we play it? How it can effect change?”
Abel Selaocoe’s album ‘Hymns of Bantu’ is out now
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