Saturday 23 May 2015

Hilton Schilder :: Rebirth (2015)

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Hilton Schilder was born into a musical family in Lotus River, Cape Town. He is the son of esteemed South African jazz pianist Tony Schilder (1937-2010) and nephew of Ebrahim Kalil Shihab (formerly Chris Schilder) of Cape Town’s groundbreaking jazz-fusion group of the 1970s Pacific Express. He was given his first instrument in the form of a drum at the age of three.

Hilton’s musical trajectory has taken him through a variety of groups and collaborations in the capacity of both a composer and a performer. He partnered with Mac McKenzie in the mid-80s to form the Genuines, a rock outfit that channelled the folk music of the Cape through punk. The band’s first two releases on the Shifty label tethered them to the broader Voëlvry movement and cemented their legacy in the history of South Africa’s alternate music scene.

Post-Genuines, Hilton immersed himself into jazz and was a member and contributing composer to Robbie Jansen’s Sons of Table Mountain. In the early 2000s, he performed with the Goema Captains of Cape Town and released his first solo album entitled No Turning Back on Mountain Records in 2003. He was the project leader of the South African and Swiss collaborative jazz ensemble Iconoclast in 2008.

In 2010, Hilton fought cancer and lost a kidney in the process. While in hospital, he heard what would become the composition “Rebirth” during a morphine-induced lucid dream. Waking up bedridden and without access to an instrument, he memorised what he could recall of the piece by imagining a piano keyboard on the ceiling.

“Rebirth” is a spiritual masterwork by a seasoned musician at the height of his powers - a sonic journey of sweeping light and shade that is both personal and universal in the depths it traverses. The piece is issued over two sides of a vinyl 7-inch single in a sleeve featuring Schilder’s distinctive ink drawings and is also the title track of a solo piano album.

Hilton Schilder - Rebirth (2015)
1. Rebirth
2. Tesna Part 15
3. Birsigstrasse 90
4. Tesna Part 5
5. The Art of Flying


















Hilton Schilder Selected Recordings 2003-2009