Hennie Bekker

Hennie Bekker is an award winning, multi-platinum selling musician whose eclectic career spans decades, continents, generations and genres. Best known for his New Age sound on the SolitudesTM, Kaleidoscope and Tranquility album series, he was also a creative force behind BKS, one of Canada’s most successful techno/dance bands. Bekker was raised in Mufulira, a Zambian copper mining town 10 miles south of the Congo border. In those early years, he was captivated by the symphonic sounds of the African wilderness, the haunting harmonies of tribal chanting and the rhythmic dialogue of drummers communicating between camps at sundown. He is a self-taught pianist who had his professional debut at age 15, spending the next decade performing with various bands throughout Zambia, Zaire, Zimbabwe and Kenya. His success as a fusion-jazz musician and band leader elevated him to become the musical director for one of South Africa’s largest record companies. Here, he added scores of film, television, radio and commercial music to his list of career accomplishments. In 1987, Bekker emigrated to Canada where he concentrated on commercial work and recorded over twenty instrumental albums for stock-music companies. This experience led him to SolitudesTM, where he composed ambient melodies to compliment Dan Gibson’s nature sounds. The two collaborated on the first fourteen Exploring Nature With Music albums, a highly successful series that has sold gold, platinum, double platinum and triple platinum volumes. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.