Decades have elapsed since Juno Award winner Hennie Bekker lived in Zambia. Yet childhood memories of Africa have left an indelible impact on his musical sensibility.
Hennie Bekker
As a boy growing up in the remote copper-mining outposts of Nkana and Mufulira, Bekker would run barefootthrough the bush with his African friends, listening to the sounds of birds high in the trees and to the rustle of wild animals deep in the jungle
At sunset on some days, he would hear the haunting beat of African drummers communicating with each other from many kilometres away.
“This made a lasting impression on me,” said Bekker, who immigrated to Canada in the late 1980s.
“The complex rhythms of the drums were sensational,” he recalled. “I can still hear them in my head. They gave me an appetite for African music.”
Such primal influences formed Bekker, a composer and arranger who has a phenomenal 45 albums to his credit.
Chief among them is the African Tapestries Collection, which consists of a box set of five CD albums: Temba, The Smoke That Thunders, Kusasa, Jabula and Amani.
Bekker won a 1997 Juno – presented by the Canadian Academy of Recording Artists and Sciences – for Astroplane, the best dance recording.
In addition, he has been a Juno Award nominee three times each in the best instrumental artist and best dance recording categories.
“Canada has been very good to me,” said Bekker in an interview one recent afternoon.
On Thursday, May 28, at 8 p.m., he showcases his wares at a concert to be held at the Jane Mallett Theatre, St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts.
Billed as “a journey through the majesty and mystery of the African continent,” the show will underscore his ability to fuse ambient, New Age and world music.
Purely instrumental, Bekker’s music lends itself to introspection. “You can sit back and shut your eyes to it,” he said.
A pianist by trade, Bekker launched his career as a recording artist after leaving South Africa and settling in Canada in 1987.
In Johannesburg, his base from 1962 onward, Bekker was the musical director of a large record company.
He arranged and produced scores for a succession of television dramas and documentaries commissioned by the South African Broadcast Corp. He was also active in the local film industry, working with, among others, South African director Jamie Uys and American actor Anthony Quinn.
As well, Bekker composed theme music for commercials for Aquafresh and Colgate toothpaste, Barclay Bank credit cards, Brylcream brilliantine, Carling Black beer, Datsun automobiles, Hertz car rental, Dunlop tires, Bols brandy, Holiday Inn, Kodak cameras, Jhirmack shampoo, South African Airways, Lucky Strike cigarettes and Schweppes beverages.
In Canada, he continued composing music for commercials, landing jobs from Burger King, Canon, Hyundai, Kraft, Sani Flush, Toshiba, Sensodyne, Stelco Steel, Toshiba and Ultra Slim Fast.
But in the main, he devoted himself to making recordings. Thanks to a lucky break, he met Dan Gibson, a Canadian filmmaker and naturalist who was looking for a composer familiar with the acoustics of nature.
Scouring stock libraries, Gibson chanced upon Bekker’s name. It was a good fit. Bekker and Gibson collaborated on 14 Solitude albums, some of which were quite successful.
Harmony, Breaking Through the Mist and Pacific Suite won double platinum, platinum and gold awards, while Great Lakes Suite, The Classics, Algonquin Suite, Rocky Mountain Suite and Appalachian Mountain Suite cleaned up, too.
Bekker also achieved success with CDs like Spring Rain, Summer Breeze, Autumn Magic and Winter Reflections and with the Tranquility series.
Although these albums have been popular in countries as far away as Russia, Bekker has not always reaped the financial rewards of his creativity.
“The whole music scene is suffering from file sharing and downloading,” he said. “I’m surprised something hasn’t been done about it.”
Bekker, 75, was born in Nkana, a town in Zambia’s copper belt more than 200 kilometres north of the capital, Lusaka.
It was not uncommon to find Jewish families like the Bekkers in places like Nkana or Mufulira. “Most of the Jews were shopkeepers,” he said.
When he was 10, his father, Hennie, a mining supervisor from South Africa, bought him a piano. Bekker was a self-taught pianist. “I never went to music school.”
At the age of 11, the Bekkers moved to Zimbabwe, then known as Rhodesia. They settled down in Bulawayo, the country’s second-largest city.
Bekker joined an itinerant band as a pianist, and the gig took him through Africa, including the Congo.
Eventually, he settled in South Africa, finding the musical scene in Zimbabwe too small and confining for his talents and ambition.
In Johannesburg, the country’s cultural hub, Bekker established himself as a regular in fusion-jazz clubs, all the while tending to his day job as a record company musical director.
Ultimately, he tired of South Africa. He hoped to to stretch himself out musically and had grown weary of its stifling racial segregation apartheid system.
“It was getting me down. It was a situation that could not last,” said Bekker, a soft-spoken man of few words. “I felt an answer had to be found to it in the form of a more democratic society.”
In retrospect, he is surprised that South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy was non-violent.
“For that I’m very thankful.”
He left Johannesburg in the early 1980s, landing in London, where he composed and arranged for such figures as Freddie Cole, Magna Carta and Stanley Black.
Feeling the need yet again to reinvigorate himself, Bekker immigrated to Canada, where he and his family have been ever since.
He and his third wife, a South African from Johannesburg, feel quite at home in Toronto.
Though he is well past retirement age, Bekker has no immediate plans to retire.
“I enjoy working in my studio,” he said, adding that he is currently in the throes of developing yet another album.