As President Obama delivered his first speech in the region this week, the United States is also trying what the State Department labels "public diplomacy" - reaching out to local populations to let them discover American values. Funding for US cultural and education exchanges in Algeria reached $8.5 million for the 2007-2008 fiscal year, said Rafik Mansour, the head of public outreach at the US Embassy in Algiers.
"You can think of us as the soft-power program," he said. "It promotes mutual understanding."
On the last night of the jazz festival, hundreds of people in Constantine pressed against the gates of the concert hall to catch a glimpse of a Minneapolis bluesman.
Islam Foura, 21, lined up for three hours to get a ticket, but was among several hundred turned down. Foura and his friends conceded they didn't know much about jazz, but craved any sort of culture.
"This is just about the only chance we get to hear jazz," he said.
"We call Constantine Algeria's biggest village: There's nothing here," added Mehdi Demech.
"And jazz - it's the 'groove,' " interjected Hicham Khelfelh, saying the word in English to show how much he had learned on the Internet and by watching pirated Hollywood movies.
On a downtown esplanade, hundreds of people listened to music and watched a digital screen late into the night amid little police presence - a rare scene on Algerian streets. Inside the grand old opera house, leading blues player Bernard Allison shouted, "Are you ready for the blues?"
"Yeah!" shouted back the crowd of some 450 people packed tight in the sweltering heat.
The festival's organizers are a nonprofit association of local musicians who started the yearly event in 2003. They called it "Dimajazz," a play on words based on the Arabic term "majaz," which means bridge.
"Jazz was new to Constantine, so it was a big bet," said Noureddine Nesrouche, one of the four founders.
Nesrouche described how his generation felt asphyxiated through the 1990s, with virtually no cultural activity during a decade of near civil war between government forces and Islamists that killed up to an estimated 200,000 people.
"We needed some life in the town," he said.
