Jauk Armand Elmaleh-Lemal (drums, percussion, vocals), Sven Krug (double bass), Aaron Seitz (piano), Pierre Ballis (saxophone), Eric Petzoldt (saxophone, flute) and Ralf Wagner (drums).

At the beginning of the three-day residency ‘Moroccan Music and Jazz’, the ensemble Jaukdakka Afromed under the direction of Jauk Armand Elmaleh-Lemal will perform a concert, combining Moroccan music, jazz and improvisational approaches with compositions by Elmaleh-Lemal. To celebrate 60 years of Moroccan dakka jazz, the Afro-Mediterranean Jaukadakka will reconstitute itself in Kassel with German and French musicians.

The concert will be complemented by an introductory lecture in English by journalist and writer Rita Stirn-Wagner on the subject of Moroccan music and jazz.

The introductory lecture and concert will be streamed on YouTube. The link to the stream will be sent out a week before the lecture and concert, after your subscription to this event.

Biographies

Jauk Armand Elmaleh-Lemal is a percussionist, composer and dance teacher. His musical career began in the cosmopolitan entertainment milieu of Casablanca in the late 1950s only a short time after Moroccan independence. In 1961, he collaborated with Amazigh (Berber) musicians from Marrakech in one of the first Moroccan explorations that brought Western music such as jazz into exchange with Amazigh musical practices. With his so-called dakka jazz, he moved to Paris in 1968, where he came into contact with European and US jazz musicians. There, he continued his own ‘choreo-musical’ studies of traditional Moroccan rhythms, movement, corporeality and improvisation. In France, he worked for various choreographers, including Carolyn Carlson, Peter Goss and Merce Cunningham. In 1979, he founded the first dance course at the Sorbonne University in Paris, which he co-directed throughout the 1980s. Elmaleh is deeply integrated into the Moroccan jazz scene, which is characterised above all by its festivals. In Morocco, he acted as the artistic director of the European Jazz Festival Jazz au Chellah in Rabat in 2016. To this day, his musical explorations take him across the Mediterranean into the most diverse areas of musical production, ranging from improvisational approaches to traditional Moroccan music and rock.

Rita Stirn-Wagner was born in Strasbourg, France. After an academic career as a professor of Business English in France, the USA and Morocco, she now works as a freelance writer and translator. In 2017, she published her book ‘Musiciennes du Maroc – Morocco’s Women in Music’ and presented it at international conferences (Canada, UK, Azerbaijan and Morocco). She currently writes for the web magazine ‘Music in Africa’ and has published articles on jazz in Morocco, women in music in Algeria and Saharan music in Algeria.