String theory

Renowned cellist Abel Selaocoe reflects on his life journey from a South African township to the elite world of classical music

- Kate Kellaway

Abel Selaocoe walks into a bar in King's Cross, London, with a small suitcase and a large, curvaceous silver case. "I'm sorry, sir, but you're going to have to put that in the cloakroom," the waitress says.

"I can't - it's my life," Selaocoe exclaims, and gives her a winning smile. She tries to insist, and watches, bemused, as he steers both cases into a corner. It is about his life that we are here to talk-his extraordinary journey from growing up in a township outside Johannesburg to becoming a classical cellist of international renown and a singer, composer and improviser of dazzling originality. Selaocoe (pronounced Se-lau-chay) has developed a music of his own into which he pours everything he is, his South African heritage and his ideas about life. His cello is a multitasker, often a percussion instrument. And when the cello is not supplying the percussion, Selaocoe uses his extraordinary voice instead: full of melodious yearning one moment, growling as if disinterred- an ancestral voice - the next.

I heard him play in a show called One-Man Medicine that could, given its effect on his audience, have been medicine for the masses. In a mulberry suit, dreadlocks swept up into a ponytail, he bent over his cello with intent concentration as if in conversation with it, his face reacting to every note: impish, frowning, radiant. At the end, the audience rose to their feet as one. Selaocoe, 30, will perform this year at the Lucerne festival (for the classical elite) and at Womad in anticipation of the release of his debut album, Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae).