Cellist Abel Selaocoe Continues to Redefine His Approach to the Instrument 

By Thomas May | From the March/April 2025 issue of Strings

Any attempt to label Abel Selaocoe’s artistry is bound to fall short. While many of today’s young musicians defy easy categorization, Selaocoe ventures even further into uncharted realms. His expansive philosophy of communication views the cello as the extension of a larger voice—a storytelling device to navigate multiple dimensions of identity and community. Selaocoe uses his cello in tandem with singing, improvisation, body percussion, and ensemble energy to amplify a fundamental impulse to express, to connect, to belong.

“Music is embedded in everything we do in South African life,” says Selaocoe. “Not even only as an artist, but as a member of the public, being able to express yourself musically through the voice or dance has been such an integral part of my growing up.”

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It’s no coincidence that the title of Selaocoe’s new album, Hymns of Bantu (Warner Classics), emphasizes an image of collective singing. The word “hymns” evokes a sense of shared experience, reverence, and storytelling through music; “Bantu” connects the album to a vast network of languages and cultures spread across Africa. What drives Selaocoe is a desire to celebrate the interconnectedness of past and present generations, as well as the interplay between his South African heritage and the Western classical training that has likewise shaped his artistic sensibility.

“Tsohle Tsohle,” the opening track, signals this sense of connection from the outset with a Sesotho phrase meaning “everything is everything.” (Most of the album’s selections have titles in the African languages that Selaocoe weaves into his musical vernacular: Sesotho, Tswana, Pedi.) “Tsohle Tsohle”transforms a traditional South African hymn into a beguilingly inviting soundscape in which the voice effortlessly traces a path amid an animated fabric of solo cello, strings, and percussion. Further on, in his poignantly personal interpretation of a piece by Marin Marais for solo viola da gamba, Selaocoe reworks a quotation from “Tsohle Tsohle” as if the two sources had always been part of a larger whole. 

A Sense of Gratitude 

That strategy reflects an abiding curiosity that has fueled Selaocoe since his childhood in Sebokeng, a township south of Johannesburg, where he was born in 1992 (shortly after the abolition of apartheid). Noting that his was “a happy childhood,” Selaocoe (pronounced Se-LAU-chwe) absorbed music from the mix of cultures he knew early on as the child of a Tswana father, a mechanic, and a Zulu mother who worked as a domestic. This involved the music of church hymns and other spiritual celebrations but extended to lessons in classical music when his brother Sammy—one of three older siblings—inspired him to attend an outreach program offered on the weekends by the African Cultural Organization of South Africa (ACOSA) in Soweto, about 30 miles to the north.

Founded by the legendary South African violinist Michael Masote, ACOSA incubated the Soweto Symphony Orchestra and the Soweto String Quartet. Selaocoe has referred to Masote as “the Black godfather of classical music in South Africa” who was “instrumental in influencing township people to explore art beyond our own culture.” He first studied cello with Masote’s son, Kutlwano Masote, at ACOSA. “Many amazing figures came to teach there,” he says, “such as Yehudi Menuhin.”

A deep sense of gratitude imbues Selaocoe’s reflections on his upbringing and influences. Despite an eight-year gap, his older brother Sammy, a bassoonist, played a pivotal role in nurturing his musical journey. “He wanted to feed me his musical knowledge and keep me going,” Selaocoe recalls. “He was very invested in me. In classical music, especially in learning an instrument, you need somebody who keeps encouraging you. I was lucky that my brother was such.”

When Sammy started a church band in Sebokeng, he invited Abel to join in and thus gain his first experiences improvising on the cello in the vibrant context of South African music making. This early exposure to blending the instrument with improvisation and local traditions would become a defining feature of Selaocoe’s artistry. “These two things were in me from a young age as a kind of DNA,” he says. “While I was learning the classical world, I was also improvising and taking the cello into spaces that were not very classical.”

Selaocoe’s passion for discovering classical cellists—on the radio and on recordings—also led him to find “other cellists who were veering away from the classical world.” He cites Yo-Yo Ma as being “very important for me as a young cellist, not only because he delved into the other genres, but because of his ability to grasp freedom across cultures.” Ma even joins with Selaocoe on the opening track of his debut album from 2022, Where Is Home (Hae ke Kae).

“I was so impressed by his versatility and by how dedicated he is to the art of playing classical music in a way that goes beyond the cultural parameters of how to be in a classical space,” Selaocoe remarks. “He made it a very human experience, rather than a class experience.”

Sammy helped his brother prepare to audition for St John’s College, the renowned boarding school in Johannesburg, which he started attending at 13. Selaocoe was only 18 when he moved to Manchester—which remains his home base—to undertake studies at the Royal Northern College of Music.

“When I arrived in Manchester, I was excited as a student of classical music and was dedicated to the principles of the cello, playing in competitions and in rigorous classes where students would critique each other.” Selaocoe names the cellist Hannah Roberts as another significant mentor who was “extremely malleable in her approach to music and not dogmatic about what a classical cellist should be. When I presented the idea of writing my own music and using my voice and throat singing, she was super open to that and immediately looked for people who would be able to foster me in that kind of place. At the same time, she didn’t let go of the idea that I should still be dedicated to my work as a classical musician, which I think was a huge help, because I could have just flown away from it.”

Collaborative Energy 

As his career as a cello soloist began to blossom, Selaocoe soon found himself at home in a wide array of settings, from major concert halls to jazz festivals and intimate clubs. He sprang into the international spotlight during the 2021 edition of the BBC Proms, when he presented a signature program of his own compositions and improvisations intermingled with new arrangements of French Baroque music and pieces by other contemporary composers.

My first experience of Selaocoe in performance was with the Seattle Symphony in April 2023 with the US premiere of his cello concerto Four Spirits. Its diversity of inspirations and presentations of self—a kind of musical memoir of growing up in South Africa—offered an ideal introduction to this artist’s larger-than-life stage presence (of which the cello is just one component). With a characteristically charismatic generosity, Selaocoe encouraged the audience to participate in his chanting, leaving us floating with a sense of collective joy.

Selaocoe founded the experimental trio Chesaba in 2016 and, in 2022, the Bantu Ensemble, establishing a pattern of intense collaboration with a group of like-minded musicians that informs Hymns of Bantu and many other projects. The Bantu Ensemble made its Carnegie Hall debut last October as part of this season’s ongoing US tour. When discussing the new album, Selaocoe frequently refers to the contributions made by the “incredible improvisers” who inspire him: the percussionists Sidiki Dembélé (from the Ivory Coast) and Dudù Kouaté (born in Senegal), the Irish bassist Alan Keary, and the London-based pianist/multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas, an ECM label artist who has developed a specialty for alluring, inventive arrangements of music by J.S. Bach and who also served as producer for both of Selaocoe’s albums.

Another ongoing partner, the Manchester Collective, appears as the string ensemble featured on the album. It weaves together with Selaocoe’s richly emotive solo cello to especially stirring effect in Thomas’ arrangement of the Sarabande from Bach’s Suite No. 6 for solo cello, one of several highlights. The recording was made in Stoller Hall, a small concert venue in Manchester especially prized as “a space that allowed our instruments to do their natural job and to play lots of rhythmic music.”

In Search of Common Threads

“I’m a collection of my influences,” says Selaocoe, referring to his ability to hold music associated with very different “spaces” within his artistic imagination as complements and extensions of each other rather than either/or propositions—or even contradictions. “I think the heart of it is expression through song, which is something universal, something that everyone relates to.”

Indeed, for Selaocoe, it all starts with the voice. In his overall practice, his vocalizations are as important as his singing cello (a copy of a c. 1735 Montagnana made by Robin Aitchison in 2020). The melding of instrument and voice on Hymns of Bantu often creates an effect that seems simultaneously ancient and innovative, even timeless. This is especially the case with his incorporation of the so-called overtone, or throat singing, of Xhosa women, which Selaocoe deliberately set out to study nearly a decade ago. Elsewhere, he has said that using the voice “took me to a much more magical place.”

While Where Is Home, his first album, embarked on “a search of what I am,” Selaocoe regards Hymns of Bantu as more oriented toward a narrative of connectivity and shared roots “because some of these songs are much more traditional, with classic hymns and contemporary takes on them.”

For example, he fondly recalls that when he used to practice Bach and other Western composers as a child at home, “my mom would sing some of the melodies in her own way, because they can become earworms. I think that’s why there’s a bit of reinterpretation when I approach this music. If you take an instrument such as the cello or the violin, and it goes into so many parts of the world, you can’t expect it not to be touched by the culture that is there. In every culture, the idea of melody changes. How we listen to that when Bach reaches Africa changes.” At the same time, he compares Bach to “understanding the beauty of a certain science. It sometimes feels as old as gravity, a force of nature.”

Another key role model for Selaocoe is the Sicilian cellist and composer Giovanni Sollima, to whom he was initially introduced by Hannah Roberts. “He’s an interesting and wild character—the Jimi Hendrix of the cello,” he says. Selaocoe has frequently performed L.B. Files, Sollima’s Boccherini-inspired cello concerto from 2005, in the last movement of which the composer “imagines that Boccherini returns, after a few hundred years, from Senegal.” Hymns of Bantu includes the concerto’s quasi-cinematic first two movements, which provide a platform for highly distinctive facets of Selaocoe’s playing style, ranging from rapid-fire virtuosity to a kind of sustained, melancholic ecstasy.

Sollima has motivated Selaocoe in particular as a bold researcher “who looks at where things came from long ago, such as the history of the sarabande, its connection in South America from over the ocean in Africa.” This kind of research inspired Selaocoe “to start looking into the thread that binds different worlds together. In the African violin world, for example, the bow resembles a Baroque bow but is much smaller—literally the width of my hand. I’m forever searching for ways to translate this music to what I’m doing on the cello.”

Such connections underpin the dialogues between cultures and between eras explored on Hymns of Bantu. Noticing that a piece from Marin Marais’ “La voix humaine” shared some similarities with“Tsohle Tsohle,” for example, Selaocoe decided to rearrange it, “thinking of parallels between hymnal singing in South Africa at the time Marais was writing his piece.”

Selaocoe says that he intends for the album “to highlight some universalities that we all share and some common threads between cultures”—but in a way that “celebrates each culture on its own” without reductively “fusing” them into some sort of melting pot.

“The Bantu are a very diverse people, going from Southern Africa all the way to East and West Africa. I wanted to extend that to the rest of my audience, to show a thread that binds the idea of playing classical music with African music.”

Selaocoe adds: “I’m a sonic artist of my own cultural landscape because I celebrate my culture, but I also allow it to change in my hands in a contemporary manner. So I’m not trying to recreate exactly what my ancestors did with my voice or how they danced but make it my own. I think that’s how it can get passed down in a very progressive manner.”