Tristan Waterkeyn, Cape Town Virtual
With its magnificent beaches that are coveted by sun-worshippers and surfers all over the world, Cape Town is a glorious place to get away from it all. It also has a fantastic night life, with some of the finest musicians in the world playing nightly. A great deal of the evolutions in world music have their roots here, and it continues to be a place where the most talented players test their skills and their ability to innovate. This has an infectious energy that runs through the city, so that it seems to run on an energy that is as varied and beautiful as the beating of the heart. The best Cape Town hotels are centrally located to the best of urban life or natural beauty, and all of them offer spectacular amenities to keep your heart satisfied.
You can find the best of the old and the new here. Like the music, everything is in the midst of a new innovation, making for a setting that is inspiring and rejuvenating. It is also a city with a fantastic history, where some of the most important events of the past centuries happened here, and there are plenty of museums and monuments to visit, to educate the young people about the mistakes of the past, and the possibilities in the present moment. The present moment is very exciting here, and it seems pregnant with possibilities. You can see this sensibility in all the art forms, where practitioners are looking for new ways of making their art, and often, being persistent artists, they find them.
One fantastic performer who’s found an interesting angle into the whole thing, is a Cape Town artist named Tristan Waterkeyn. He calls himself a virtual busker, crossing the digital with the intensely local. Busking is the art of performing on the streets, and he’s been promoting himself in cyberspace, and asking for a few dollars online, the way someone would pass the hat. It’s a spectacular idea, and he’s the exact talent to do it, too. His mellow and lyrical style has been compared to Jack Johnson, and is really rather startling in its complexity of lyrics with the splendid simplicity of the music, and it’s easy and beckoning, just like the best street musicians. The Cape Town artists is now heading to South America, and sure could use a dollar, if you happen to hear him playing out in the ether. He’s worth looking for, too.