Jazz, soul & blues
B.B. King
B.B. King (1925-2015) was one of the most faithful regulars of the Montreux Jazz Festival: twenty-three concerts in all, from the first live album recorded there in 1979 to the concert given aboard a CGN boat in 2006. In between he filled the Auditorium Stravinski again and again, notably on 15 July 1993, filmed and released as “Live at Montreux 1993”. The king of the blues and his guitar Lucille are part of the Montreux landscape as much as the lake itself: a bust in the Palace garden, a street-art mural in town.
B.B. King: from 1979 to the boat of 2006
A regular, not a guest
Some artists came to Montreux once and left a mark. B.B. King kept coming back: twenty-three concerts at the festival, which places him among the very first in its history.
The earliest trace is a record: “Recorded Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival”, captured in 1979. The king of the blues was then fifty-four, with a long career already behind him, Montreux became one of his benchmark European stages.
The concert everyone has seen
On 15 July 1993, B.B. King played the Auditorium Stravinski. The concert was filmed, then released as “Live at Montreux 1993”, today one of the most widely circulated documents from the festival archives, carried on streaming platforms.
He came back four years later, on 8 July 1997, again at the Stravinski. And he kept going: in 2005 he was on the bill of the 39th edition.
A concert on the lake
In 2006, the festival tried something it had never done: putting a concert to sea. B.B. King boarded a CGN boat from the Montreux landing stage and played on the lake.
It was a first in the festival’s history. The photographs from that day show a man of eighty, smiling and approachable, surrounded by the audience on deck, an image that sums up rather well what he meant to Montreux.
What remains in Montreux
His bust, sculpted by Marco Zeno and given by Barbara J. Riley to Claude Nobs, shows him with Lucille, his guitar, in the garden of the Montreux Palace. In town, a street-art mural pays tribute to him on the Décal’Quai trail.
His concerts, filmed since 1979, belong to the festival archives inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.
Videos
B.B. King in Montreux: the festival, the graffiti and the bust, video Visit Montreux
Related places
▸Buste de B.B. KingBustOpen the place →
© Llez, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons The king of the blues and his guitar Lucille, immortalised in the Palace garden by Marco Zeno.
▸Graffiti B.B. KingStreet artOpen the place →
© Visit Montreux A street-art mural in tribute to the king of the blues, a legendary regular of the Montreux Jazz Festival.
▸Montreux Jazz FestivalFestival / 2M2C convention centreOpen the place →
© Visit Montreux The heart of the festival since 1993: under one roof, the Auditorium Stravinski and the halls that host half the history of music every summer.
▸Débarcadère de MontreuxCGN landing stage / floating venueOpen the place →
© Visit Montreux The boarding point for the CGN’s Belle Époque boats. Nothing took place on the landing stage itself: it was on board that Queen hosted the press in 1986 and B.B. King played a concert in 2006.
