Mi Casablanca es su Casablanca: Boulevard Fest welcomes all [part 1]

But the organisers of Casablanca's Boulevard Festival aren’t too fazed about what other festivals do or how they do it. As far as they're concerned, Boulevard stands for unapologetic inclusivity of all genres and fans who don't get the time of day in a country where irrepressible commercialism wins all the time.

In the middle of it all is festival organisers and cultural operator Hicham Bahou who started the festival in 1999. At that time Moroccan alternative music was severely marginalised and Bahou saw a dire need for a platform where bands could develop their talent. He identified the FOL Theatre in Casablanca where he and his partner, Mohammed 'Momo' Merhari, began providing rehearsal space for young bands. The two friends organised weekly gigs, competitions and jam sessions and Boulevard Festival was born soon after.

"The festival became a point of connection for all these bands, the audience and their friends," Bahou tells Music In Africa on the sidelines of the festival's recently concluded 2018 edition. "But the most decisive call that we made was to work all year round at FOL, and the festival became the synthesis of all our efforts. In 2003, we left the venue and organised the festival at a big rugby stadium near here because the FOL was too small with a capacity of just 400 people. At one point there were 1 000 people in the venue and 2 000 outside destroying the facade of the place, so we had to find a bigger venue."

Boulevard Festival has been growing ever since the FOL was bursting at the seams 15 years ago. This year the festival featured seven action-packed days of hip hop, metal and fusion/world – the first three dedicated to the Tremplin battle of the bands competition where three winners and three runners-up got a chance to perform alongside their idols a week later during the final stretch of the festival. In the interim, the bands attended workshops where they were taught about copyright, royalties, stagecraft, multimedia and marketing. The workshops took place at the Boultek, a music centre and arts space in Casablanca equipped with rehearsal studios, a live venue, web radio and training rooms.

Even though Bahou is proud of the work the Boultek is doing, he loathes the dearth of venues willing to accommodate original bands.

"Behind the festival is the Boultek, which is quite invisible to most people," Bahou says. "Boultek is the driving force behind the festival, because it operates 365 days in the year. Many metal bands, for example, get to play only at the Boultek or Boulevard Festival. The same goes for hip hop crews. That's because there are no live venues in Casablanca. People seem to enjoy mainstream bands that play covers; they don't seem to be interested in hearing new creations. And although Casablanca is known for its many theatres, we don't have a live concert hall, and the theatres don't open their doors to young creatives. What Morocco needs is a cultural policy. Like many other places in the world, you'll see tourism policies and projects of monumental scale, which are commercial and basically constitute bells and whistles without investing in culture, education or arts spaces and venues."

Cultural policy or not, Morocco's young creatives are doing pretty well in producing decent music that with a little more effort could be seen playing on touring circuits across Europe and even in the US. The winner of the Tremplin metal competition, Casablanca-based prog band Kawn, was arguably one of the best-received acts at last Saturday’s metal/rock night. The band employs various prog rock approaches as well as smidgeons of power metal and djent. The main songwriter of the band, guitarist Tarik Heddoun, verges on the virtuosic while vocalist Said El Harrami's phrasing and timbre often remind the listener of Blind Guardian's Hansi Kürsch. Much like the German power metal band, Kawn also dabbles in concept and theatrical compositions, with Heddoun telling Music In Africa that he's planning to write a number of pieces based on the adventures of Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta.

Other bands that played on the night included Tremplin metal runner-up Cyn, an instrumental progressive metalcore outfit hailing from the city of Meknes, last year's metal competition winners Thrillogy, punk rockers ZWM and headliner Septicflesh, whose stage show blew the Casablanca crowd to smithereens.

In part 2: Hip hop and fusion at Boulevard Festival and Hicham Bahou talks about the late Moroccan journalist Amale Samie.