Jazz, soul & blues
Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996), the “First Lady of Song”, discovered Montreux on 22 June 1969, at the festival’s third edition, and would return several times. That first concert says everything about her intelligence as an interpreter: backed by pianist Tommy Flanagan, bassist Frank de la Rosa and drummer Ed Thigpen, she mixed the standards that made her name with covers of the hits of the moment, Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude”. In her fifties, the queen of scat was taking on the repertoire of a younger generation.
The festival was three years old when Ella Fitzgerald sang there for the first time, on 22 June 1969. She was fifty-two, with thirty years of career behind her.
Her stage trio that night: Tommy Flanagan on piano, Frank de la Rosa on double bass, Ed Thigpen on drums. The programme was a surprise, alongside “I Won’t Dance” and “That Old Black Magic”, she performed “Sunshine of Your Love”, Cream’s track from the previous year, and “Hey Jude”, which the Beatles had just released.
Far from a concession, that choice was typical of her: Ella Fitzgerald had always taken the popular music of her time as raw material, whatever its label.
Claude Nobs loved to tell how he had gone to fetch Ella Fitzgerald at the wheel of his Lagonda, in 1969, with her feared impresario Norman Granz. On the motorway the car broke down; it took the Swiss touring club to reveal that a second fuel tank opened at the push of a button. At the hotel, Ella switched on Swiss television: “Wherever I go in the world, I watch local TV” (“Le petit prince du jazz”, Le Matin, 2011).
Like almost every Montreux concert, this one was filmed and recorded. But it stayed in the festival’s archives for decades.
It took until 2005 for a first DVD release, and then until 20 January 2023 (more than fifty years after the concert) for “Live at Montreux 1969” finally to appear on CD and vinyl on Mercury Studios.
It is a concrete illustration of what the festival archives represent, inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register: a collection where entire concerts sleep until someone wakes them.
1969 was only a beginning: Ella Fitzgerald came back to sing in Montreux several times through the 1970s.
Her bust, by the sculptor Danièle Lauffer, was installed in 2007 in the garden of the Montreux Palace thanks to Barbara J. Riley. It stands alongside those of Ray Charles, B.B. King, Aretha Franklin, Carlos Santana and Quincy Jones: Claude Nobs’s pantheon.
The “First Lady of Song”, sculpted by Danièle Lauffer, microphone in hand in the Palace garden.
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.
1969
The concert of 22 June 1969, Ella Fitzgerald’s first appearance in Montreux, with Tommy Flanagan on piano, Frank de la Rosa on double bass and Ed Thigpen on drums. Left in the festival archives, it was only released on DVD in 2005, then on CD and vinyl on 20 January 2023.