Marseille: After five years of absence, the Babel festival returns and expands

COME-BACK The festival had disappeared since 2017 due to budget cuts in the Paca region

Marseille March 13, 2012 – Showcase of Sibongile MBAMBO on the occasion of the press conference of the Babel Med Music festival — P.MAGNIEN/20 MINUTES

After five years of interruption, the festival and market musical Babel Med, one of the most famous in Europe, returns in March 2023 to Marseille with an “broadened” renamed “Babel Music XP”, to serve as a “gateway” between musicians from different continents and the music industry.

For this first edition of Babel Music XP will be represented as much traditional music associated with the “classification of world music” that rock, hip-hop or even jazz groups from Asia, Africa or America, announced Tuesday the director of the festival, Olivier Rey.

Budget cuts

For the rebirth of this institution which had known 13 editions under its old version, the message is to &laquo ; to say that with the public’s new [consumption] practices and new techniques [used for artistic creation], musical and geographical borders are porous and that we can move from ;a musical aesthetic to the other,” in press conference.

Discontinued in its old form after its 2017 edition due to budget cuts in the Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur Region , the Babel Music XP festival had a prologue in November 2020 in the form of encounters at; distance but without music, due to the Covid-19 epidemic.