Every year, in July, the city of Montreux hosts one of the most prestigious music festivals in the world. The history of the Montreux Jazz Festival is closely linked to one man, Claude Nobs, a local of the Swiss Riviera and the creator of this major event, who over the last 35 years has managed to bring to his native town some of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century. Mr Nobs, the son of a nurse and a baker, was born in 1936 very near Montreux in the little town of Territet. He developed an early passion for music and particularly jazz. Confronted with the lack of assiduity that he showed at school his parents asked him to chose a profession and so the young man decided that he would train to become a chef. Cooking remains to this day one of his passions, together with music and his region. It is this latter passion that made him accept a job with the local Tourist Board and that made him travel around Europe to promote the charms of the Swiss Riviera. Claude Nobs had already started dreaming of bringing music to the lakeshore.
His first journey to New York, commissioned by the Montreux Tourist Board, was to be the starting point of the festival. On that particular occasion the young Swiss decided to pop into the offices of Atlantic Records –nothing less than one of the biggest record companies in the world – and he simply asked to speak to the Director. Chance had it that the Director's parents had been Turkish ambassadors in Bern and, intrigued, Nesuhi Ertegun agreed to meet him. And this is how the story started. The Montreux Jazz Festival took place for the first time in 1967 for only three days but the artists invited already included such names as Keith Jarrett, Cecil Mc Bee and Jack de Johnette.
Over its 37 years of existence the event has welcome a truly impressive list of artists. It started with prestigious jazz musicians such as Bills Evans, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, Gerry Mulligan, Aretha Franklin, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and Dizzy Gillespie, to name just a few, but over the years the festival has opened its doors to a wide range of musical genres: blues, pop, rock, reggae, soul, gospel, tango, flamenco, Brazilian music and increasingly electro-rock, drum'n'bass, hip hop and acid jazz. The diversification of musical genres present in Montreux is nowadays such that one might wonder why the word 'jazz' is kept in the festival's name. The decrease of jazz features in the festival, some might regret, has been inversely proportional to the increase in the ticket prices. For indeed contrary to many European summer festivals, that try to inscribe themselves in the 'Woodstock tradition' of long-haired students the Montreux Jazz Festival likes to retain an aura of glamour.
But in spite of the disappointment of some jazz purists, the festival is really worth going to and it constitutes a major event for the local tourism industry. It is also worth mentioning that, since 1995, the public has also been able to enjoy free concerts in the Montreux Jazz Café and in the Off–Festival.
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