After Dan Mace set up a spontaneous and rather WILD Talent Show on the streets of Cape Town, South Africa he happened upon a unique musical duo that instantly caught his eye.
Giuliette Price and Chad Samuels (who goes by his stage name C.H.A.D) met in the audition line and started chatting. They had both just been walking by when they saw Mace and the impromptu stage and decided to join for fun, so neither had a song prepared. Then they walked out in front of Mace and began improvising together, and no one could tell that the two had only just met.
Price’s smooth jazz voice and incredible guitar skills blended brilliantly with Samuels’ on-the-spot rap and lower harmonies. They played off each other in a way that only experienced musicians can, and it worked out marvelously.
Mace had been holding a Talent Show as part of an episode for his TV series with Warner Brothers Discovery: ‘The BRU Show’, where he wanted to showcase and highlight the incredible talent in South Africa just walking around on the streets. He and the audience were blown away by the musical performance of Price and Samuels, so much so that Mace offered to help the two write and record a song professionally.
He knew he would be able to give these undiscovered artists a platform and shine a light on local South African talent (which was the entire point of his Talent Show in the first place) along with the help of Jason Winde, the music producer and score composer at Mace’s film production company JOE. So Mace invited the musicians to write and record at the JOE office, where they have a professional sound studio fully kitted out and ready to go.
“It was so spontaneous,” Price said, “Everything about it was so on-the-spot, in-the-moment. I loved working with Jason, Dan, and C.H.A.D. The fact we were able to gel and just, like, connect on a musician basis from the moment we met each other was really beautiful”.
Mace and Winde produced the track under SMAC! – their musical duo alias – with Samuels writing and recording the lyrics alongside Price, all in one day. Samuels and Price are both local musicians from Cape Town (Samuels is a freestyle rapper and Price is a Jazz singer) so writing and recording a song about their love for their city felt like a natural step in their music careers.
“Making a track in one day sounds like an impossible task, which I thought it was, but after being surrounded by such talent and passion it made the pressure kind of fun – like seeing how great we could make this track in such a short space of time.” Winde remarked, “So we were all just running around the studio with no time to second-guess ourselves, which really worked out well in the end. And obviously having Dan there shouting ‘Let’s go, let’s go!!’ made us move faster, haha”.
The track will be released on Spotify on July 7th, but in the meantime you can watch the beautifully animated lyric video (which they also managed to pull off in one day) here. The video reached 9000 views on the first day and is now over 66000 views, and we can’t wait to see how these incredible local musicians’ careers take off.
