Second Jazz Tales Music Festival to commence

CAIRO – 2 April 2018: The Jazz Tales Music Festival’s second edition will be underway this month, running from Apr. 10 until Apr. 14.

Organized by the Bibliotheca Alexandria (BA) and the American University in Cairo (AUC), the event will be held at the BA and AUC’s Tahrir Campus. Like last year’s festival, this event will see jazz concerts being held over several days, bringing together Jazz musicians and lovers of Jazz alike to celebrate their appreciation of the genre.

The program for this edition begins with Wust El Balad & Halie Loren on Apr. 11, followed by Noha Fekry & Kirk MacDonald performing on Apr. 12, Eftekasat & the Simon Spiess Trio on Apr. 13 and the Cairo Big Band & Malnoia on Apr. 14 to top it all off.

Last year’s event ran for four weeks across 12 concerts, from Mar. 7 until Apr. 1, and was a considerably grand affair, drawing in massive crowds from all across Egypt. An impressive number of Egyptian and American Jazz artists participated, including the likes of The Rad Trads and The Boghdady Big Band, the Todd Marcus Quartet.

Participating local bands included Wazz Jazz Band and the Cairo Big Band Society, who are returning again for the second edition, the Akram El-Sharkawy Group, the Shady El-Qaseer Group, Marcus Band, the Michel Project and the Huntertones Band.

Apart from the concerts, various eight-hour long workshops hosted by an Egyptian and American band bring a unique cultural exchange of education to Egyptian audiences, showcasing the similarities and differences between the techniques of American and Egyptian jazz artists.

An ambitious project, according to Hisham Gabr, the director of the BA’s Art Center, the festival aims to revive the jazz music genre in Egypt. It also seeks to allow a platform for jazz artists from all over to display their best work, dazzling audiences and proving that jazz is every bit as relevant in the modern world as it was in the past.