Saturday, September 13, 2014

19th Chellah Jazz Festival ~ Opens in Rabat on September 17


The 19th edition of the Chellah Jazz Festival opens the cultural season in Rabat from 17 to 21 September 2014. This major event, dedicated to the discovery of European jazz and to the encounter between European and Moroccan jazz musicians, has become a real gateway of dialogue between the North and the South of the Mediterranean. It hosts 15 bands and 53 musicians coming from 15 European countries and from Morocco, carefully selected for their high musical quality



The festival opens with a Dutch trio, De Jongens Driest (pictured left): Van Strien Janfie: saxophone, Joop van der Linden: trombone and Arno Bakker: sousaphone.

The group are described as perhaps the smallest of the bands that ever made its horns gleam under the sun! Their jazz is powerful and "groovy", inspired by klezmer and Balkan traditions, African highlife and Latin American music.

The festival continues with different sounds and musicians from Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Greece, Bulgaria, United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, Finland, Poland, and Spain, together with artists from Morocco.

The huge crowd at the final night in 2013

The artistic directors Majid Bekkas and Jean-Pierre Bissot said: “We have selected these artists for their musical quality but also for their capacity to present on stage an aspect of the strong and engaged identity they have built. Each concert brings a new emotion. Each European jazz-Moroccan music meeting will be a new page of this new musical reading that the Chellah Jazz promotes.”

Since its creation in 1996, the festival has become a fixture of the cultural scene in Morocco. The festival is an initiative of the Delegation of the European Union to Morocco in partnership with the Ministry of Culture, the Wilaya of Rabat Salé and the French Institute in Morocco, together with the embassies and cultural centres of the EU member states

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