music

Music Artists

Les Javan En Die Delta Vastrapgenootskap

In 2007 the Delta Trust initiated a Cape music project in the rural Winelands. Research focused on exploring, preserving and honouring the origins of  Cape music through extensive fieldwork.

Influences on the vernacular music by indigenous Khoe and San traditions, European folksongs, slave cultures from across India, Indonesia and Africa and more modern global dynamics were explored. Rural musical ensembles were simultaneously formed by Alex van Heerden. These included the Delta Optel Band as well as a larger brass band. After Alex’s untimely death in 2009, Adriaan Brand became music project co-ordinator. Today the brass band is called Delta Bluestars.

Recently a smaller brass ensemble, the Delta Langbroek Band, was begun for more advanced players. Both these bands play a mixture of local material (old and new) and re-invented material from elsewhere. There is also a women’s choir, the Delta Soetstemme, who perform traditional material and songs by Leslie Javan.

Local primary school children are also offered song writing workshops, where they are taught for example that their ancestors said things in song that they dared not say directly. The best way to protect a cultural heritage is to stimulate its future growth.