Festivals & events

Montreux Jazz Festival

Type: Festival / 2M2C convention centre
Address: 2M2C, Montreux Music & Convention Centre, Avenue Claude-Nobs 5, Montreux

Founded in 1967 by Claude Nobs, the Montreux Jazz Festival was born at the Casino with three evenings of jazz and a handful of spectators. Today, for two weeks each July, it occupies the 2M2C (Montreux Music & Convention Centre) a vast building set on the quays that brings together the Auditorium Stravinski (nearly 4,000 seats), the Montreux Jazz Lab, the Montreux Jazz Club and the hall renamed in tribute to Quincy Jones. This explains why a single festival has so many addresses: the stages have changed name and building over the decades (the Casino of the early years, the Pavillon, the Miles Davis Hall) but the event itself has never left the lakeside. The word “jazz” has stayed; the programming has not: rock, soul, pop, electronic music and hip-hop all found their way in from the 1970s onwards. The festival’s audiovisual archives, which preserve almost every concert filmed since 1967, are inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.

From three jazz nights to the Memory of the World

From three jazz nights to a legend

The festival was born in 1967, dreamed up by Claude Nobs with Géo Voumard and René Langel. The very first edition, three nights at the Casino, drew a handful of spectators around the Charles Lloyd quartet (Live from Montreux).

Success was immediate. Thanks to his connections in the record industry, Claude Nobs drew the whole history of jazz to Montreux, then, from the 1970s, rock, soul and pop: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Santana and Frank Zappa all played there. The name “jazz” stayed; the line-up opened up.

From 1991 to 1993, Quincy Jones took over as artistic director and had the festival captured in high definition, a world first. Since Claude Nobs’s death in 2013, the festival has been run by Mathieu Jaton.

The ‘Montreux Sound’

From the very first edition, in 1967, Claude Nobs had the concerts recorded, in audio and then, from 1968, in video, a rarity at the time. In the mid-1970s the concert sound was mixed live on the Mountain Studios console, at the Casino, by the engineer David Richards: this blend of jazz, rock and pop gave rise to the ‘Montreux Sound’. Over the first fifty years, eighteen tape formats followed one another, amounting to more than eleven thousand hours of video and six thousand hours of audio.

The Memory of the World and the Montreux Jazz Digital Project

In 1988, finding that some original tapes had gone missing, Claude Nobs bought them back and built a climate-controlled vault next to his chalet to preserve them. In 2007, his meeting with Patrick Aebischer, president of EPFL, launched the Montreux Jazz Digital Project: the digitisation of the collection’s fourteen thousand tapes. “It’s the most important testimonial to the history of music, covering jazz, blues and rock,” said the producer Quincy Jones in 2009. After Claude Nobs’s death in 2013, his partner Thierry Amsallem created the Claude Nobs Foundation and had the collection inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register, with the support of Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones.