The 17th edition of the Jazz au Chellah festival, which is being held from 13 to 17 June, honours meetings and fusion, which have become the trademark of this annual cultural event.

This year, it is the diversity of meetings that the organisers have put on the menu of this festival, which has given birth to a new form of jazz that, by mixing genres and becoming a place of mixing for artists, tends to better sweep away prejudices, indicates the delegation of the European Union, organiser of this happening.

"Each evening reserves its share of surprises and something strong happens: it is the moment of the meeting", explains Majid Bekkas, Moroccan artistic director of the festival.

In the opening, a Greco-Moroccan meeting in homage to the Mediterranean with the Greek group Kostas Theodorou, whose jazz is imbued with Mediterranean and Balkan accents, who will join the quartet of Simo Baazaoui, who has evolved in the world of flamenco and Hispanic music.

Throughout this festival, presented as a forum for dialogue between north and south, mixtures of styles and sounds will thus be performed, such as the one bringing together the Pascal Schumacher quartet with Ribab Fusion and the meeting between the Belgian group Slang and Yacir Rami, an oud musician influenced by traditional Turkish, Iraqi, Arab-Andalusian, Hassani, and Malhoun music, who will perform for the first time in Morocco, accompanied by Antoine Morineau, a Persian-speaking musician who plays in numerous musical groups.

The summit meeting will take place on Saturday, 16 June, between the Spanish quartet of Giulia Valle, a renowned double bassist on the Catalan jazz scene, and the "master" of the Moroccan Oud, Saïd Chraïbi, a regular at the festival, for a performance "filled with emotion and sensitivity".

In closing, it will be the turn of two duos: Andy Sheppard on saxophone and Jean Marie Machado on piano will meet Maalem Hamid Kasri accompanied by Karim Ziad, a regular at Jazz au Chellah, but also artistic director of the Gnaoua festival in Essaouira.

The artists will also be joined by the Gnaouas of Rabat for an apotheosis evening of this festival which, according to the EU delegation in Rabat, "contributes to the realisation of a new cultural dimension by opening the framework for healthy cooperation between artists".

Organised since 1996 by the European Union delegation in Morocco in partnership with the Ministry of Culture and the wilaya of Rabat-Salé-Zemmour-Zaër in collaboration with the Embassies and Cultural Institutes of the EU member states and the Wallonia-Brussels delegation, the Jazz au Chellah festival has succeeded in becoming "a major symbol of the partnership between Europe and Morocco".