SA’s Wouter Kellerman and Egypt’s Amir Hedayah up for Hollywood Music in Media Awards

Kellerman was nominated in the Contemporary Classical/Instrumental category for ‘Catching Up’, a song he recorded with American-Ukrainian Grammy-winning pianist Nadia Shpachenko. The track is off his new album We’ve Known All Times and was co-written by Kellerman and South African composer Wessel van Rensburg.

Hedayah, who is best known for scoring well-known Egyptian films, was nominated in the World category for his song ‘El Otoor’. Other nominees outside Africa include Archangel (US), Cynthia Thijs Coenraad (Netherlands), David Raynolds (Canada), Dyson Knight (Bahamas), Jon Altham (UK), Oli Jogvansson (Faroe Islands) and AnayaMusic (Brazil), among others.

“I’m very excited and grateful, times have been difficult and it helps very much to get recognised for all the hard work,” Kellerman told Music In Africa. “South Africa is standing it’s ground internationally and has an incredible amount of musical talent, and that is increasingly being recognised overseas.”

This is not the first time Kellerman has been nominated for an HMMA. ‘Shape of You’, a music video by Kellerman and the Ndlovu Youth Choir, won an HMMA in the Best Music Video category in 2019.

In 2014, Kellerman received a Grammy for his album Winds of Samsara, which reached No 1 on the US Billboard Charts and Zone Music Reporter's top 100 International Radio Airplay Chart.

His 2015 album Love Language debuted at No 1 on the Billboard World Music chart in its first week of release. In December 2015, the album received a Grammy nomination in the Best Contemporary Instrumental Album category and in 2016 won a South African Music Award (SAMA) for Best Instrumental and/or Classical Album.

‘The Long Road’, a solo flute piece that Kellerman wrote for Nelson Mandela, won the 2016 Global Peace Song Award in the Acoustic/Contemporary Music category. In 2019, he released In a Different Light, an album that received five nominations at the Independent Music Awards in New York, as well as two SAMA nominations, including one for Best Produced Album.

Amir Hedayah was selected as a top-10 winner at the Oticons Faculty Int'l Film Music Competition in 2015. In 2017, he scored and designed the sound for the world’s first virtual reality animated short film Lily & Snout. A year later, his score for the film Telephone won the Best Soundtrack Award at the International Festival of Educational and Spiritual Film in Spain.

View the full list of nominees here.