Carlos Santana

Ten months after Woodstock

When Santana took the stage of the Casino de Montreux on 20 June 1970, their Woodstock appearance was ten months old. The band was still a discovery for Europe, and Claude Nobs had booked them early, that was his method: go and get artists before they became unaffordable.

The festival was only four years old. Programming a Latin rock band at a jazz festival was daring at the time; it is precisely that blending of genres that would make Montreux’s reputation.

Claude Nobs had discovered Carlos Santana before his fame. In 1968 he had gone to see his Santana Blues Band in San Francisco, blending blues and South American percussion: “I told him: I’d love you to come to Montreux.” The guitarist came in 1970, with his original line-up, and returned many times (Claude Nobs, “Le petit prince du jazz”, Le Matin, 2011).

A forty-year friendship with Claude Nobs

From that first concert grew a relationship that lasted more than four decades. Santana came back regularly (the festival notably released “Carlos Santana Presents Blues at Montreux 2004”) and he was among the founder’s close circle.

On 1 July 2011, he shared the Montreux stage with guitarist John McLaughlin, in the presence of Claude Nobs. It would be one of the last great moments they lived together: Nobs had a cross-country skiing accident on 24 December 2012 and died on 10 January 2013.

In July 2012, the following year, Santana’s bust was unveiled in the Palace garden, a few months before Claude Nobs’s death. The festival’s founder thus saw, in his lifetime, his friend’s statue join those he had gathered.

What remains in Montreux

His bust, sculpted by Marco Zeno and unveiled in July 2012, shows him with his arms raised to the sky, guitar held against him: the very image of his stage presence. It was given by Barbara J. Riley to Claude Nobs, like the other busts in the garden of the Montreux Palace.

Santana played the festival in 2025: fifty-five years after his first concert, he is still on the bill.