Cape Town – Performing on a stage at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival (CTIJF) has come a lot sooner in rapper Dope Saint Jude’s musical career than she anticipated.
“I didn’t actually think that I would be performing at the jazz festival, maybe later in my career, but not so early. I’m quite excited.
“Hip-hop music has a lot of jazz influences, so the connection is a very strong. A similarity is the emotion behind the music, in that both are quite rebellious types of music. The scatting is also very similar to rap.
“I’m also excited to bring a different perspective and sound,” said 26-year-old St Jude, who began performing about 3 years ago.
Warning: This video contains some bad language
Saint Jude, whose actual name is Catherine Saint Jude Pretorious, said she began writing poetry as a teenager and this was a practice that eventually evolved into her career as a rapper.
From performances in Europe and the USA, she learnt to be more authentic because the musicians she met there encouraged her to “grow her unique South African sound”.
“Before, I wanted to make my music sound more international. Now I work hard to make it sound as authentic as possible, to sound like where I’m from; Elsies River on the Cape Flats.
"Elsies River impacts on the slang I use, the stories and the social issues I tell in my rap,” she said.
At CTIJF, Saint Jude will be performing with a live band for the first time and this has “pushed” her to grow. The band line-up is Ludwe Danxa, Asher Gamde and Rivan October.
“I’m working with a very nice band, not only with a DJ. Working with artists of a very high calibre and sharing a stage with high calibre musicians has pushed me a lot. I understand the intricacies of the music a lot better now,” said Saint Jude.
Saint Jude, who is in her last few months of completing a degree in political science at UCT, said balancing studies and a musical career that is just taking off, is hard but she is “making it work”.
For her stage name, Saint Jude uses her second name as a surname and added Dope as a first name, just to “lighten the effect” of a saint name associated with lost causes, she said.
* The Cape Town International Jazz Festival takes place at the Cape Town International Convention on Friday and Saturday. The weekend passes are already sold out, but day passes remain on sale at R690 each.