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.

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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.

B.B. King and Claude Nobs in Montreux (1982).© Daniel Gignoux

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.

“The Thrill Is Gone”, B.B. King’s most famous song, live at Montreux (1993).

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.

B.B. King at the 39th Montreux Jazz Festival (2005).© Keystone

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.

B.B. King aboard a CGN boat during the 2006 Montreux Jazz Festival, a first in the festival’s history.

“The Montreux Years”, the album from the archives

In 2021 the festival and the BMG label launched “The Montreux Years”, a series of live albums drawn from Claude Nobs’s collection, more than four thousand concerts recorded between 1967 and 2012, inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register. After Nina Simone and Etta James, who opened the series, B.B. King joined it with “B.B. King: The Montreux Years”, released on 20 November 2026, on what would have been his 101st birthday.

The cover of “B.B. King: The Montreux Years” (BMG, 2026): the finest moments from nine concerts, drawn from Claude Nobs’s collection.

The album draws on nine of his twenty-three appearances, from 1982 to 2000, from the Casino of the 1980s to the Auditorium Stravinski of the 1990s and 2000: “Guess Who” (1982), “Rock Me Baby” (1984), “Caldonia” (1987), “The Thrill Is Gone” (1990) and “Stormy Monday” (1995), restored from the original tapes. The first single, “Early in the Mornin’”, recorded in 2000, pays tribute to Louis Jordan, one of his idols.

“Early in the Mornin’”, from “B.B. King: The Montreux Years”, recorded at the Auditorium Stravinski in 2000 (official festival clip).

A bust and a mural 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.