This thesis explores the role of jazz in and from Morocco as a vehicle for interculturalism and cultural diplomacy framed by the wider context of Euro-Moroccan cultural and geopolitical relations. While providing a historical outline of early jazz encounters in Morocco, it focuses on the development of the Moroccan jazz scene since the 1990s. It specifically investigates how Euro-Moroccan musical encounters through jazz are facilitated by individuals and institutions during a time period that has seen significant Euro-Moroccan rapprochement. Drawing on ethnographic work in Morocco, France, and Germany, interviews with musicians, participant observation in collaborative-pedagogical jazz projects, volunteer work at Moroccan jazz festivals, and private archives, this thesis provides the first in-depth study of jazz production in Morocco and its implications for intercultural relations between European and Moroccan musicians. In so doing, this study seeks to analyse the socio-musical processes of intercultural music-making between musicians as well as the cultural politics of jazz as interculturalism, against the legacies of Moroccan jazz encounters throughout the twentieth century and the afterlives of European colonialism in Morocco.

Jazz in Morocco has been rarely examined in jazz studies and ethnomusicology. Existing accounts stress projects of Black US-American musicians collaborating with Moroccan musicians (Robinson 2021; Aidi 2014; Weston and Jenkins 2010; Currie 2004), but neglect the vast array of Euro-Moroccan encounters in jazz. Following Elizabeth McGregor’s work on jazz in the French Empire (2016), this thesis contributes to discussions about jazz as a diasporic, transnational music-making practice (TJS 2022; Johnson 2019) by arguing that Morocco’s jazz community evolved precisely through the blurry interzone of ‘European’ and ‘Moroccan’ cultural contact. This zone facilitated the notion of intercultural collaboration as an integral element of making jazz in Morocco but obscured unequal power dynamics and curated diversity at festivals, cultural centres, and in international recording projects. The construction of Moroccan jazz through the prism of cultural fusion has led to new career opportunities for Moroccans and revaluations of Moroccan musics but also to the marginalisation and silencing of Moroccan musicians. Framed by a triangular relationship between Europe, Morocco, and the USA, and complicated through Morocco’s recent push towards Africa, this thesis unveils the complex mechanism of jazz interculturalism facilitated by Euro-Moroccan contact and problematises the making of the Moroccan jazz scene and its historiography.