Montreux Jazz: Miles Davies to Lily Allen
Bringing the world’s music greats to the Alps
At the foot of the Alps, beside Lake Geneva, lies one of Europe’s most picturesque mountain towns.
With its fresh mountain breezes, pretty shoreline and a population of just 20,000, Montreux is a Swiss idyll. Yet once a year this chocolate box resort is thronged with music-worshipping pilgrims who have come for one purpose only: to listen to jazz music. Or not listen to jazz, as it happens. Though the festival was founded in 1967 and has drawn such jazz greats as Miles Davis, Nina Simone and John Coltrane, it now embraces a wide spectrum of musical genres. This July you are just as likely to hear hip-hop and heavy metal as swing time or bebop.
What’s more, Montreux’s surprising position in the live music circuit can be put down to one tenacious, jazz-mad local, whose determination brought some of the greatest recording artists of the 20th century to the land of the cuckoo clock: the distinctly un-jazzily named Claude Nobs.
Nobs’s musical odyssey began in the mid-1960s, when he traded his chef’s apprenticeship for a day job at the Swiss tourist board. Asked by his boss for an initiative to promote the then-overlooked resort of Montreux, Nobs came back from a trip to the States to announce, somewhat improbably, that he wanted to launch a black music festival.
Though his plans were approved by the tourist board, Nobs faced a far stiffer challenge: to persuade big-name American artists to travel to the backwater of a small European state and perform for a fee that was, by American standards, small change. The considerable charm possessed by Nobs, a down-to-earth baker’s son, seems to have served him well in this regard. In 1970, the cocksure promoter travelled to New York to persuade Nesuhi Ertegun, a partner in Atlantic Records, to lend a hand.
“He showed up at the headquarters of Atlantic, with no meeting arranged, and just said ‘I want to see Nesuhi Ertegun.’ His secretary asked: ‘Do you know him?’ and Nobs replied: ‘Yes, his name is on all my favourite LPs,’” recalls Mathieu Jaton, the festival’s current director. Apparently Nobs asked the secretary to let Ertegun know that a young Swiss German was interested in speaking to him; Ertegun, the son of the Turkish ambassador to Switzerland, had studied in Berne. The tactic worked: Ertegun was intrigued and agreed to a meeting with Nobs. “That helped the festival a lot, in terms of having big stars,” says Jaton.
Aretha Franklin was one such diva to make it to Montreux in 1971. The story goes, however, that she only agreed to perform after Nobs delivered a box of Swiss chocolates to her. Meanwhile, Miles Davis, the legendary jazz trumpeter – with a giant ego to match – played his first concert at Montreux in 1973 (his final concert there in 1992 became one of Montreux’s most famous; he died two months later) but legend has it that he originally rebuffed one of Nobs’s invitations to perform with the words: “Your offer is an insult to my talent and my colour.” Nobs duly wrote back, listing the proportion of black artists who were appearing at the festival (over 90 percent), his overall budget and all the fees he had to pay out. Davis wrote back: “Apologies. Of course I’m coming.”
Yet flicking through the line-up for 2009, you discover that shoulder to shoulder with jazz master Herbie Hancock and blues legend BB King are Black Eyed Peas, Lily Allen, Marianne Faithful, even that lipsticked purveyor of shock rock Alice Cooper.
“Jazz is first and foremost a way of thinking,” says Jaton. “Our line-up this year contains people who have a way of playing that is ‘jazz’. There are elements of jazz in their music or the spirit of jazz.”
Of course, jazz purists may sniff at such a liberal interpretation of their beloved art form, but Montreux has gone from strength to strength in its 43-year history, thanks to its open-minded policy of inviting artists who in some way nod to jazz. Appearing alongside fabled chanteuses like Ella Fitzgerald or jazz geniuses like John Coltrane has proven to be an irresistible lure for artists from as diverse fields as country, folk, R&B and rock.
As a result the festival has seen everyone from Chuck Berry, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, James Brown, Leonard Cohen and Van Morrison to Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, Prince and Bob Dylan.
“What we have at Montreux is a vast amount of history,” says Jaton. “When we’ve had Miles Davis and Nina Simone play here, people say: ‘Wow, they went there, I want to be a part of it.’”
The festival has preserved its more memorable performances by recording and filming all live concerts. Nobs began this practice as a way of creating an extensive audio and video archive; it remains the biggest of any festival in the world. When an artist signs up to appear at Montreux they also must agree to be recorded. The performers are, of course, free to use that recording for their own live album, and dozens have done so, including Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, Marvin Gaye and Deep Purple.
The 43rd festival, like most of its predecessors, boasts an incredible international lineup. Along with the queue-swelling concerts of Solomon Burke, Kool and the Gang, Seal and Jamie Cullum, there are music workshops, boat trips and train rides where jazz bands will entertain you along your journey, plus nightclubs where electro, hip hop and house will keep revellers entertained until dawn.
But does Montreux still need its ‘jazz’ moniker, after all this diversification? “In 1976, Claud decided to remove the term jazz from the festival, but it was a disaster,” says Jaton. “The backlash was that artists no longer wanted to come. The fact that the festival is so associated with jazz and jazz greats like Miles Davis is part of the attraction. Jazz is like a tattoo that we can’t remove.” 
The Montreux Jazz Festival takes place 3-18 July, www.montreuxjazz.com. Montreux is a three-hour train journey from Zurich International airport
