Claude Nobs

Territet, 1936: trained as a cook

Claude Nobs was born on 4 February 1936 in Territet, a stone’s throw from the lake. Nothing marked him out for music: he trained as a cook, with an apprenticeship in Basel and a spell at the Lausanne Hotel School, then became an accountant at the Montreux tourist office, working under Raymond Jaussi.

Everything started from that modest post. A jazz enthusiast, he used his place at the office to convince his town that a festival was possible, in an ageing spa resort miles from the American jazz circuit. The cook in him never left: welcoming and feeding his guests remained his signature.

Three days of jazz

The first Montreux Jazz Festival was held at the Casino in June 1967. Three days, a handful of spectators, and a line-up that would go down in history: the quartet of American saxophonist Charles Lloyd, with a young pianist named Keith Jarrett.

Nobs did not do it alone. He founded the festival with the pianist and broadcaster Géo Voumard and the journalist René Langel, a trio that would remain at the helm for many years.

What followed came down to a method: Nobs went to fetch the artists himself, received them himself, and made them come back. The festival very soon reached beyond jazz, to soul, blues, rock and pop, without ever changing its name. That is why a festival called “jazz” welcomed Deep Purple, Queen and Michael Jackson.

Claude Nobs had a rare instinct and a way of doing business built on trust. In 1969 he invited Chicago, his very first rock concert; the band gave him a signed poster “to the greatest promoter in the world”. With Led Zeppelin, whom he had met at Newport, the deal was sealed with no contract and no talk of money, on a single line from their manager: “Claude, make sure the guys are happy.” As for Bob Dylan, in 1994, he crossed the Casino corridor in full racing-cyclist gear, race bike in hand, before going on stage (Claude Nobs, “Le petit prince du jazz”, Le Matin, 2011).

“Funky Claude”

During Frank Zappa’s concert at the Casino, a member of the audience fired a flare into the rattan ceiling. The building went up in flames. Part of the audience was trapped in the basement: Claude Nobs went down and got them out.

Deep Purple, who were due to record in that hall and watched the scene from across the bay, would draw “Smoke on the Water” from it. A whole verse is devoted to the man going in and out of the blaze. That is how a Swiss festival director became, under the name “Funky Claude”, a character in the global rock repertoire.

Nobs did not stop there: he found the band another hall, the Pavillon, then, after they were thrown out for noise, let them move into the Grand Hôtel de Territet, empty for the winter. “Machine Head” would be recorded there.

The chalets at Caux

Above Montreux, in the hamlet of Caux, Claude Nobs owned two chalets, linked, a detail that says everything about the man, by a model railway.

That is where he received his guests after the concerts: fondue, a collection of records and jukeboxes, conversation until dawn. More than ten thousand of the world’s most famous musicians passed through, Thierry Amsallem reckons, in an intimacy no festival dressing room could offer. That hospitality was not an extra: it was the reason artists came back to Montreux.

The friendships that built the festival

Claude Nobs’ address book was not a card index: it was friendships, kept up over decades. B.B. King, who came twenty-three times, Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James and Aretha Franklin came back because he went to fetch them himself and received them at his home.

The most decisive was with Quincy Jones. The producer became the festival’s artistic director from 1991 to 1993 and returned almost every summer until his death in November 2024; he liked to call Montreux the “Rolls-Royce of music festivals”. It was that bond, too, that brought Miles Davis to Montreux for his final concert in July 1991.

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It was Nesuhi Ertegün, the head of Atlantic Records, who opened the doors of the industry to him: in 1973 he took him on at WEA International (Warner), where Claude Nobs stayed until he retired in 2001, keeping direct access to the biggest artists (Live from Montreux ↗). But the spirit of the festival came above all from his vision: “Claude designed the festival for the artists; they came for Montreux and improvised a great deal,” sums up his partner Thierry Amsallem (« L’invité », TV5MONDE ↗).

In July 1970, an RTS camera caught Claude Nobs and his long-time partner in crime, the blues pianist Champion Jack Dupree, in a wild improvisation for the bathers at the Casino pool. That year, Champion Jack’s contract — he was an excellent cook — stipulated that he would cook if the audience was hungry, or play if they had no appetite. Years later he returned Claude Nobs’s friendship by coming to play for the residents of the Burier care home, where Nobs’s parents lived (RTS, directed by Pierre Matteuzzi and Christian Zeender).

His death and his legacy

Claude Nobs died on 10 January 2013, from the consequences of a cross-country skiing accident near his chalets. He had run his festival for forty-six editions. The festival has since been led by Mathieu Jaton.

Montreux has given him a statue on the quays, a bench facing the lake and the avenue running alongside the 2M2C. The Claude Nobs Foundation looks after his legacy and the festival’s archives: more than eleven thousand hours of concerts filmed and recorded since 1967, added in 2013 to UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.

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