El Gusto – Masters of Chaabi Reunite

“Open up JazzFest!” − an adequate password for the opening act of this year’s festival, with over 40 participants from Algiers, Paris and Marseille, all sworn devotees of Chaabi music and dedicated to keeping it alive. The ‘Blues of the Maghreb’ was most popular in the 1940s and 50s and its activists have long been scattered to the four winds.

“Algeirean” documentary filmmaker Safinez Bousbia initiated a search for the original musicians and revived a group of gentlemen, most of them on the far side of youth but all still passionately burning for their music and driven by the desire to celebrate ‘the great reunion of Chaabi’. Most of the protagonists have not met for decades, one of the reasons being that many of the Jewish musicians, in the course of the growing Islamization following Algeria’s independence, looked for shelter in other countries, mostly in France.

With their invincible charm the reunited musicians will lure the audience to the marketplace of an oriental town somewhere between the past and the future. JazzFest Berlin will witness a fairy-tale come true, an intoxicating festival of sounds, archaic yet alive, moving but also cheerful – Arabian Nights continued!