Bokani Dyer

Bokani Dyer is an award-winning singer, pianist, composer, and producer from South Africa. His approach to jazz includes elements of electronic music, R&B, Afro-Latin, and classical. He is one of his country's most prodigious keyboard talents. Dyer's playing style is at once inventive -- his use of the piano's middle register is virtually unlike anyone else's -- elegant, and often as breezy and affirmative as it is inquisitive. After studying with Jason Moran in New York, he released his debut, Mirrors, in 2010. After winning the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Jazz the following year, he issued the star-studded Emancipate the Story. Oscillations followed in 2013. His third album, 2015's World Music, was nominated for Best Jazz Album at the South African Music Awards. 2019's trio offering, Neo Native, won it. 2020's Kelenosi was recorded completely solo during the pandemic in 2020, and Radio Sechaba appeared in May 2023 on Brownswood. Dyer was born in Gaborone, Botswana in 1986, during South Africa's reign of apartheid. His father, veteran saxophonist and composer Steve Dyer, was like many South African artists of the era: he worked in exile. In 1990, at age four, Bokani's family relocated to South Africa. He received piano lessons at 14 and, despite wanting to attend the Berklee College of Music in the U.S., his father insisted he study jazz at the University of Cape Town. He graduated in 2008. While at school he met a number of young players equally focused on balancing South Africa's musical traditions with emerging styles from around the world. He was awarded two international scholarships facilitating training and master classes with world-renowned musicians including piano with Andrew Lilley. Dyer's music owes a debt to his father's, particularly the restless, genre-jumping brand he played with the band Southern Freeway. Further influences on the young pianist include Moses Taiwa Molelekwa and Bheki Mseleku. In 2009, he was runner-up in the SAMRO Overseas Scholarships competition. The award allowed him to travel to New York where he was tutored by pianist Jason Moran. In 2010, Dyer released his debut album Mirrors, consisting of his own compositions. The following year he issued Emancipate the Story. He populated the album's roster with a world-class cast: Trumpeters Marcus Wyatt and Mandla Mlangeni, saxophonist Buddy Wells, drummer/percussionists Ayanda Sikade and Tony Paco, bassist Shane Cooper, and guitarist Mark Buchanan. He hired them with the prize money from winning the year's Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Jazz. He made his first European tour playing in Switzerland, Germany, the Czech Republic, and the U.K. Dyer was invited to perform at the opening of the London Jazz Festival that November. Seven months later, in July 2015, he issued his third album, World Music, backed by a septet that included Wells, Cooper, trumpeter Robin Fassie-Kock, and saxophonist Justin Bellairs, as well as a vocal chorus. Getting international radio play, as well as an abundance of airtime at home, made Dyer's record a nominee for Best Jazz Album at the 2016 South African Music Awards. 2016 also saw him guest on tenor saxophonist Sisonke Xonti's debut album, Iyonde. In addition, he performed as a soloist at the launch of the SA/Russia Cultural Seasons in Moscow. Dyer broke into composing soundtracks in 2017 with the score for the South African film Catching Feelings. As a performer, he played at all of Africa's jazz festivals that year. In 2019 he released the trio offering Neo-Native. With a rhythm section that included bassist Romy Brauteseth and drummer Sphelelo Mazibuko, he created an album wherein all of the players provided chorus vocals while bridging jazz modernism with South African traditions. It took home the year's South African Music Award for Best Jazz album. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, Dyer was writing and arranging a collaborative album. Unable to work with other musicians, he composed solo piano pieces and gradually overlaid them with original beats, basslines, samples, and other instrumentation. Titled Kelenosi (translated from Setswana, it means "alone"), it appeared late that year to international acclaim. Its meld of styles, from Afrobeat, neo-electro, and jive to jazz, salsa, and R&B attracted listeners from the South London music scene and Brownswood label founder Gilles Peterson. Dyer contributed "Ke Nako" for the opening track on Indaba Is, the label's 2021 South African jazz scene overview curated by Thandi Ntuli and Siyabonga Mthembu. In May 2023, Dyer released Radio Sechaba, his Brownswood debut. It marked the realization of the album he'd begun and abandoned when the pandemic shut him down. Jam-packed with guests, the 14-track set of originals was Dyer's first album to contain and showcase all of his inspirations and influences from South Africa to North America and beyond. His father Steve was one of its many guests. The set was recorded and mixed by Dyer and Sheppo Mothwa at the family's Dyertribe Studio in Johannesburg.
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