By Umnia Rais
Tetouan - The annual event Jazzablanca festival will be held for the 11th time on April 16-24 in Casablanca and will feature six international jazz performers.
Since its inception in 2006, more than 400 musicians have performed in the Jazzablanca Festival and since then, it has become one of the key events for Jazz music lovers around the world.
To start off the festival, American singer and song-writer Macy Gray will be performing. The R&B singer has 8 studio albums, one live album, three compilation albums, 27 singles, seven promotional singles, and 21 music videos. Gray has received five Grammy award nominations. She has also appeared in a number of films including Training Day, Spiderman, Scary Movie 3, and For Colored Girls.
Jazz bassist and musician Richard Bona will take the stage on day two. Richard has ten albums including “Voices,” “Moyo,” “Kosmo,Mwaliko” and “Beyond Words.” He has released one live album “Bona makes you sweet” in 2008 and one extended play” Kaze ga Kureta Melody” in 2000.
The Franco-Moroccan singer Hindi Zahra is set to perform on April 18. Her first album” Handmade” was released 2010 and the second one “Homeland” in 2015. She has performed in more than 300 concerts in one year and half. Her songs are mostly in English, French with some Berber lyrics.
Melody Gardot is a Grammy nominated American singer, writer and musician. Her first album “Worrisome Heart” was released in 2008. She released her second album “Me one and Only Thrill” in 2009. Her single ” Who will comfort me?” subsequently became a top 10 hit at Smooth Jazz radio.
In 2012, she released her third album “The Absence “and in 2015 her forth “Currency of Man.” Gardot will be performing Jazz, Acoustics and Blues on the Casa-Anfa stage on April 19.
Goran Bregovic will perform on the same stage on April 20. He is one of the internationally known Yugoslav modern musicians and composers of the Balkans. Among his better known scores are three of Emir Kusturica’s films: Time of the Gypsies, Arizona Dream and Underground.
The Jazz-Pop singer and song-writer Jamie Cullum will also be present on April 21 at Casa-Anfa stage performing varied genres of Jazz. After his first television appearance on Parkinson in 2003, he released three albums with Universal who beat Sony in a bidding war.
Cullum’s first studio album "Heard it all before" was released in 1999, his latest album, titled “Interlude,” was released in 2014.
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