Prince

16 July 2007: the Jazz Night at the Stravinski

On 16 July 2007, Prince was the festival’s surprise guest, kept secret until late in the edition. The announcement went around the world: the biggest pop star of the day after Michael Jackson was coming out of retirement to lead a “Jazz Night” in the intimate setting of the Auditorium Stravinski. As the journalist François Barras recounted in 24 heures ↗, the concert appeared on his Wikipedia page several days before it took place, like an already-historic event.

That evening, security was extreme: no photographers, no cameras, no phones. The singer was glimpsed around 7.30 p.m., after the sound check, “very elegant, all in beige, with a big black hat” on his way to his limousine. The concert, announced for 9 p.m., began three quarters of an hour later, in a hall two-thirds full.

A brass trio crossed the audience to the sound of “When the Saints”, in a New Orleans mood. Prince appeared in a red suit, black glasses and hat, received his musicians’ solos, tried out a guitar, sketched a dance step and left again, without saying a word: a long jazzy jam, a pop “anti-concert.” Later that night, he gave a second concert at the Jazz Café, the festival’s club.

2009: the guitar hero

Visibly won over by his first experience on the shores of Lake Geneva, Prince returned on 18 July 2009 for two concerts given the same evening at the Auditorium Stravinski. A few days earlier he had rehearsed at the Petit Palais, made available to him by the festival, with a small, virtuoso line-up.

The two concerts, largely unheard in their content and the songs played, mirrored each other. The first, at a calm tempo, was of rare melodic beauty: Prince sang divinely and unfurled some of the most inspired guitar solos of his career. The second carried on in the same vein, but more rhythmic.

In love with Montreux and Lavaux

Beyond the concerts, it was the whole region that won Prince over.

It was this 2009 visit that sealed his bond with the region. Simon Tomei, the festival’s head of transport, had picked him up at the airport: “Prince did not want to go straight back to the hotel, so I offered to show him around the region. We took the Chexbres exit to reach Vevey by road, through the vineyards” he told the ATS news agency. “I explained the UNESCO label, the wines, the extent of the vineyard. He showed great interest and took notes, asking me to spell certain names, including Lavaux.”

That drive gave rise to “Lavaux”, one of the ten tracks on the album “20Ten”, released in 2010. The song also mentions “the chocolates of Vevey”: the Nestlé building had amused the singer. The story, first revealed by the daily 24 heures, was confirmed by the festival’s spokesman Francesco Laratta to swissinfo ↗, in July 2010. That evening, Prince had met the Vevey sculptor Zapoff, at the MAD Club, in Lausanne.

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2010: Prince as a spectator

The following year, in 2010, Prince returned to Montreux as an ordinary spectator, with no special security. He followed Janelle Monáe’s concerts, at the Miles Davis Hall and then at Funky Claude’s Bar, then called Harry’s Bar. Between the two, he shared a bite with Quincy Jones and Shania Twain in a public establishment in town, as Julien Delafontaine reported in 20 minutes ↗.

2013: the very big band

Never two without three. In 2013, the year of Claude Nobs’s death, Prince gave three concerts, one a night, on 13, 14 and 15 July. For the first two evenings he took the stage with nineteen musicians, the largest line-up of his whole career, a band that would give only a handful of concerts, starting with those in Montreux.

For two nights the “Strav” took on the air of the Apollo Theater. An heir to James Brown, Prince made himself master of ceremonies: at his command, the band “dug the groove”, piled up solos, hammed it up, and entertained itself and the audience.

The last evening, Prince’s final concert on Vaud soil, changed everything. He revisited his repertoire as a rock quartet, backed by his band 3rdeyegirl, and ended with a long jam in which he threw out samples of his own work, picked up by the band and by dozens of spectators invited on stage.

The dilemma of a superstar

Every one of Prince’s visits was an event, but his choices sometimes disconcerted an audience that had come to see “the” Prince of the hits: “There weren’t enough hits”, “he didn’t play guitar”, people said on the way out. Tellingly, it was his very last concert, in 2013, the only one not specially designed for Montreux and whose form had been tried out in North America that spring, that finally won everyone over. For his fans, those evenings by the lake forged part of his legend.

When Prince died, on 21 April 2016, he was touring “Piano and a Microphone”, alone with his voice and a piano. That show was due to pass through Switzerland at the end of 2015, at the Théâtre de Beaulieu in Lausanne and a Lucerne venue, before being cancelled after the Bataclan attacks. It is said that it could have become the last-minute surprise of Montreux Jazz 2016: this time, the dream did not come true.