Festivals & events
AI.LOVE.JAZZ
- Type
- Festival & contest
- Address
- Riviera Café, Casino Barrière, Montreux
Not open to visitors
AI.LOVE.JAZZ presents itself as a “global hub for AI artists”, seeing artificial intelligence not as a replacement for human creativity but as “a new instrument in the hands of the talent”. Its first edition, on 9–10 July 2026, brought together at the Riviera Café of the Casino Barrière in Montreux a global online competition and a live event, in the year of the Montreux Jazz Festival’s 60th anniversary. The contest mixed jazz, blues, funk, soul and melodic rock, composed with the help of generative-AI tools; on the first night, tracks were even performed live by a jazz band. Five winners were honoured at the final gala, with “Frozen Edge” by the South Korean Yong Ho-seong, a former vice-minister of culture taking first place (AI.LOVE.JAZZ).
The first edition
Two nights in Montreux
For two nights in July, marking the 60th anniversary of the Montreux Jazz Festival, music composed with the help of artificial intelligence was brought to the stage by world-class musicians, before a room of artists who had travelled from across the globe, innovators, investors and music lovers. “This was never just a contest: it was the beginning of a movement,” the organisation sums up.
The first champion
The big winner is no studio regular. Yong Ho-seong is a former first vice-minister of culture of South Korea, long in public service (since 1993), and also a drummer and music critic. Once retired, he went back to school to learn AI-assisted composition and set himself a challenge: to set Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets to music.
“Frozen Edge”, his prize-winning track, grows out of Sonnet 97 and the emptiness that follows a breakup, as cold as winter. He left the melody and the vocals to AI, but wrote the lyrics himself. “Thanks to AI, I was able to start a new music career,” he says. “I think this contest signals the beginning of AI transforming the way music is created” (The Korea Times).