Based: Cape Town
Simiso Radebe’s music career in Cape Town has played out over various episodes of residential upheaval. His new apartment has served him well, except for the time the elevator was being serviced and, back from a busking session at a nearby shopping mall in the southern suburbs, he had to carefully haul his violin and amplifier up seven flights of stairs. Simiso left Durban in 2021 to join the Mother City Philharmonic Orchestra, a now defunct project haunted by legal squabbles that left him unpaid and unable to pay rent. The move to his current building was fast tracked by a rainstorm that seeped through the light fixtures in his last rental: Simiso had to excuse himself from a Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra rehearsal to evacuate. Recounting these events safely on the seventh floor, the conversation is derailed by the click-clack woosh of the Metrorail outside. Does this quirk annoy him? “No,” the violinist replies. “I love it. It reminds me that I’m still alive. Get up and do something with your life.”
Not that Simiso has ever lacked motivation. As an eight-year old boy, the youngest of four siblings growing up in Diepkloof, Soweto, he had a formative experience watching his teenage cousin play the violin. That night, in a vivid dream, Simiso was an expert violinist: “It was so real,” he remembers to this day. His mother wasted no time signing him up to his cousin’s music programme at the local community hall. After a gruelling six-month theory-based initiation, Simiso finally picked up the violin and never looked back.
Before long, Simiso moved up the road to the Buskaid Soweto String Project, a charitable trust founded by the British orchestral violinist Rosemary Nalden, who packed up her life in London at the age of 48 and moved to a freshly democratic South Africa in 1997. With his Twinkle Twinkle Little Star audition, Rosemary identified Simiso as an exceptional talent, providing him the tools he needed to excel: In addition to a classic education, Rosemary would encourage her students to develop their sound by incorporating elements of their personal culture. “Once we’ve acquired those [classical] skills,” Simiso explains, “we enhance them and make them our own. It’s traditional music, but then on the violin.” A combination of talent and unwavering commitment propelled Simiso to prodigy status: at 13, he caught his first flight to the United States. It was the first of many international Buskaid performances.
Simiso describes the Buskaid musicians’ role as cultural ambassadors, teaching their unique elixir of musical expression to foreigners as a basis for a collaborative performance to round off the trip. In Colombia, Buskaid created what Simiso describes as a fusion of baroque music with traditional djembe drumming and contemporary dance. “South Africans can relate to Colombia,” he says. Beyond the sunny weather conditions (“Those people, they tan!”), there’s a cultural common ground. “It’s rhythm,” Simiso explains. “We’ve got similar rhythmic gestures. And our rhythm of life, it’s similar.” The resulting performance was received with feverish enthusiasm. “People love it. Some are in tears. Some of them want the actual t-shirt that you are wearing, which after the show is sweaty as hell,” he laughs, “but they want it.”
