R.I.P. Alex van Heerden

It’s been at least more than a month since Alex van Heerden, a 34 year old trumpet and accordion player was killed in a car accident outside Cape Town. I finally got around to write this.

At the time of his death, Van Heerden, according to newspaper reports, was mostly playing electronic music (Van Heerden would be quick to correct that he was not playing or composing the “vulgarity of South African electronic music). But it is more as a jazz musician that I know Van Heerden’s sound. Van Heerden represented, along with the drummer Kesivan Naidoo (with his bands Babu and Restless Natives), and a few others, the future of avant garde music in South Africa.

Anyway, Van Heerden, whose admirers included Gilles Peterson, mixed a range of South African genres and sounds (boeremusiek, goema, vastrap, and the riel, among them) and worked with bands like Mac McKenzie and The Goema Captains of Cape Town, Robbie Jansen’s Sons of Table Mountain, Gramadoelas (my favorite Van Heerden music), Namaqua (this was a kind of “superband” featuring Van Heerden, Ready D, Mr Fat, Hylton Schilder (who played with both Jansen and McKenzie), and Derek Gripper (check a sample of their work “Vrou van Samaria“) and finally the Delta Optel Band, a group of farmworker musicians in the Boland district where Van Heerden lived before he was tragically killed.