Museums, studios & shops
Montreux Sounds
: Claude Nobs’s two Bernese mountain dogs, Kiku and Kuki.](/images/optimized/artists/britto-logo-montreux-sounds_758.webp){kind=logo}
- Type
- Audiovisual production company
- Address
- Montreux
Not open to visitors
Founded by Claude Nobs in 1973, Montreux Sounds SA is the production company and rights holder of the Claude Nobs Collection: every concert filmed and recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival from 1967 to 2013. From the very first edition, Nobs had set a simple rule: capture everything, first in sound then in vision, with the greatest technical care. That instinct gave rise to one of the most important archives of live music in the world, today released under the “Live at Montreux” label and digitised with the EPFL.
Montreux Sounds, the festival’s memory
Claude Nobs’s company
From the first Montreux Jazz Festival in 1967, Claude Nobs had the concerts recorded, convinced that those evenings had to last. In 1973 he formalised the activity by founding Montreux Sounds SA, which became the festival’s production arm and the keeper of its tapes.
Nobs brought to it the same demand he brought to welcoming artists: perfect sound, perfect image. It was this company that captured, year after year, the great moments of the Montreux stage, and that holds their rights today.
The Claude Nobs Collection
From 1967 to 2013, Montreux Sounds gathered more than eleven thousand hours of concerts, thousands of performances by the greatest names in jazz, blues, soul, rock and pop. This body of work, the Claude Nobs Collection, is one of the most important audiovisual archives devoted to living music.
In 2013 the Collection was inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register, alongside historic manuscripts and archives. With the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), a vast digitisation project ensures its preservation and study, note by note.
“Live at Montreux”
Montreux Sounds brings this treasure to the public through the “Live at Montreux” releases: CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays that bring back the concerts of Etta James, B.B. King, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye or Deep Purple, among dozens of others.
The company also manages image and sound licences for films, documentaries and platforms, and presents its catalogue on the “Live from Montreux” site. Over it, the Claude Nobs Foundation makes sure the founder’s spirit keeps guiding those choices.
Related artists :Claude NobsRomero Britto