I started taking cello lessons in Johannesburg at the age of 7. My teacher was Andre Leichner, a Hungarian Jew who came to South Africa after the second world war. During my school years, i regularly participated in Eisteddfods and completed the whole series of cello examinations through the University of South Africa, all with constant high grades. After the final examination, aged 16, i was selected to compete for a bursary to take on further cello studies in Europe. However, on the basis of an interview after the performance, i was told that while i could have received the top bursary, i did not provide them with enough confidence that i wanted to dedicate my professional career to playing the cello. They withheld it from me. My school years also saw me performing as cellist as well as soloist with a number of youth orchestras.
Indeed, at the time i was not bent on making music my career. After school i completed two years of compulsory military service, during which time i hardly played the cello, except for being allowed to briefly join a string ensemble as leading cellist, going on a concert tour to Austria. I then went on to study to become a church minister, doing a BA degree in theology and philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch. Here i joined the university string ensemble, making concert tours to Italy and Hungary. This was also the time that i finally decided to make music my career, starting a B Mus degree through UNISA while living in Cape Town. But after two years of this i ran out of energy. I dropped the degree and threw myself into cello playing. After two months of practising eight hours a day, i realized however that i will kill my creative side continuing this way. (My creative side came to life before i took my first piano lessons from my mother at age five, as by then i already improvised and formed short pieces on the piano - thanks to my father's example, who played by ear and was never trained. I also took composition lessons during my school years).
I therefore thought that i should become a full time composer rather. Again, after two months i knew i would go crazy working so abstractedly through my mind all the time. This left me as a failure in both divinity and the arts, an existential dead-end that lasted for an agonizing year.
Finally something bolted in me: i want to walk onto stage and just play! No preparation. Just play. In this way, i would be able to combine my performing and creative abilities and do something that speaks to my existence as a whole. I spent my last savings on organizing a series of fully improvised piano recitals in and around Cape Town. turned out I hardly had an audience for this. Someone suggested i play cello on the streets to earn some money. This i did, and so my journey as an improvising cellist started. Here there was no established audience, no known genre, no accolades, no formal recognition, only the hearts and minds of people being moved in a direct way.
For eight years i survived mainly from improvising with the cello on the streets of Cape Town and Johannesburg. Then, in the year 2000 i started building a stage setup of electronic accompaniments and amplification, giving performances and workshops in all sorts of venues, still driven by personal networking, the direct inspirations of of all sorts of people moved by the experience. The performances grew to be about more than music, as my creativity spilled over from the musical into the theatrical, visual and physical, as did my cello playing spill over onto the keyboard or piano, flutes and other found objects. As a result of this lack of definition, I took on the stage name of "the HA!Man."
Nevertheless, the stream of connections and opportunities kept growing over four continents and four years ago brought me to a life partner (Joke Debaere) who herself gravitated towards spontaneous expression as a core competency. With her word-art and acting, a life-long adventure of creativity in the moment lies ahead.
HA!Man 3 December 2014