#jazz at montreux

[hezigler]

Miles Davis & Quincy Jones & the Gil Evans Orchestra (1991)HD

[forever70s]

Etta James performing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland (1975)

[singemall-stayallnight]

[fabiche]

Montreux Jazz Festival 1976

[lmjupdates]

Lauren on stage at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Miami #2

[nofatclips]

Liar by Emilie Zoé from the album Live at Montreux Jazz 2022

[dianessunflower]

RAYE being the cutest little angel at the Montreux Jazz Festival–July 18, 2024

[greendayauthority]

Montreux Jazz Festival, Switzerland, 7 July 2013

[ausetkmt]

Miles Davis & Chaka Khan: Human Nature (live in Montreux 1989)

THIS IS FANTASTIQUE. Check out Miles and Chaka Blowinnnnnnnnnnnn

[roseband]

I can make you mad, I can make you scream I can make you cry, I can make you leave I can make you hate me for everything But I can't make you come back to me

[dustedmagazine]

Iggy Pop — Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 2023 (earMusic)

Iggy ain’t goin’ gentle. The fiercely puckish frontman is at once a beguilingly ravaged and uncannily preserved specimen, and he and his spry band, who go unidentified in all of the available press materials documenting this 2023 Montreux Jazz Festival appearance, in the fabled Stravinski Auditorium—are in fine, if a bit slick form. They hurl themselves through a frenetic set, pungent, not only given the apparently sweaty nature of the deep summer show, running the gamut from the totemically primal catalog of beloved standards that constitute the Stooges’ resoundingly influential early 1970s LPs, to a handful of cheekily barbed numbers plucked from Pop’s more recent output.

Iggy’s band sounds vital from the first note of opener “Five Foot One,” and he is in fine voice, crooning “I’m only 5’1”/Unless the time has come/I won’t grow anymore,”his Napoleonic self-deprecation somehow simultaneously defiant and comical. Singer and musicians are in mellifluous sync, and the song is well-chosen as an opener, suiting Pop’s irrepressible rock and roll insouciance, his infectiously, eternally adolescent fervor, which never falters or wavers, to a tee. It is tastefully peppered with horns a la latter day James Chance, somewhere between the louche electro funk of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion circa Orange and a gentler Rocket from the Crypt. Not groundbreaking, but it sounds great.

And yet, these time-tested, still electrifying punk rock torch songs have been neutered somewhat here. The performances are professional, perfectly calibrated, even virtuosic. In this way, the interplay between frontman and band is reminiscent of a similarly magisterial band with a similarly magnetic frontman—the J.B.’s, and James Brown—as on the show’s performance of “Lust for Life,” with its iconically louche, martial opening beat.  And the recording’s documentation of this skillful execution is remarkably pristine. The guitar tone is warm. The drumming shifts between an assaultive, reverberant bass drum sound, rattling snares and nuanced textures on the toms. These ace session players (?) are, in a word, unimpeachable.  And yet, it’s all a bit restrained, and at times stale, formulaic. The band is seamless, but not trenchant, lacking an edge. There are moments of “Down on the Street” that sound like overproduced, ersatz 1980s new wave, like a corporate rock supergroup, shades of Robert Palmer or Power Station, which the preponderance of horns hints at throughout. “Lust”’s  audience call and response sounds anodyne, dutiful, where it should be raucous, exuberant. Feels more like a pep rally with a college football marching band than a throwdown—though the crowd is audibly psyched.  Pop’s delivery is velvety, but he doesn’t deploy it to the gritty, unflinching ends one might expect, or at least hope for.

The set’s take on “Raw Power” is quasi-vaudevillian, as Ig swaggers his way through a beguiling cascade of honkytonk piano chords hammered flamboyantly, with percussive verve. His is a commedia dell-arte-esque vamp on a punch-drunk nightclub emcee here, as he bobs and weaves his way through the cracked anthem like a bygone borscht belt circuit fixture, emulating his own Pop mythology superficially, as though from a place of slight remove, rather than embodying it fully, viscerally, at least in vocal terms. “It’s hot and smelly, motherfucker,” he observes unself-consciously, but convincingly, toward the end of this rendition. The crowd loves the display. They’re here to see Pop in a familiar guise, not a reimagined one. And yet, he's 75. So having him onstage in even a slightly redundant or attenuated form is nigh on miraculous, and should be celebrated. It feels churlish to critique.

Indeed, there’s Vegas showmanship and an inherent spirit of fun, but schmaltz afoot, too, as in this show’s rendition of “TV Eye,” which arrived like a fully-formed, bludgeoning slab of proto-sludge on The Stooges’ irascible second album, Fun House, a lacerating leap from the proto-punk of their debut to squalling avant-noise terra incognita. Here, the totemic track feels leached of menace. With its oversaturated horn section and jazzy background vocals, it verges on being a carnivalesque caricature of itself. 

Doubling down on theatricality, Iggy quavers in a neo-goth register, a latter-day David J or Ian Curtis, over “Gimme Danger”’s ominous arpeggio, which eventually regresses into a standard issue—showy, noodly—albeit well-executed guitar solo that caterwauls compellingly at its crescendo. “Fuckin’ righteous,” he intones, not so much his best impression of a punk rock surfer dude drawl, but Ig harnessing his own irrepressible essence. The iconic Pop’s innate charisma is the unmovable object here. He imbues this sometimes workmanlike, sometimes plodding show with its renegade spark, as on “Nightclubbing”. The horns sound appropriately dissolute for this sodden manifesto for the demimonde, Pop’s voice ragged, captured with uncanny intimacy by this recording’s crystalline fidelity.  Recent tracks like “Frenzy” are blunter, more simplistic, occasionally labored, ham-handed lyrically. And yet they’re rawer musically. They have a less practiced quality. They can be punishing. As such, they are more viscerally satisfying, a throwback to Rhino’s legendary Nuggets garage/psychedelia comp.

“For about 50 years, I’ve been sick half the time,” Iggy announces drily, by way of introducing “Sick of You,” and in doing so, dragging us with abandon into the heart, and apex of the set, “So it was easy to write this song.” His pithy bon mots are borne of observational acuity, but it’s his willingness to expose his foibles, to lay his vulnerabilities bare, that is particularly disarming, and a gift to fans mired in the quotidian vicissitudes of their own lives—in that timeless tradition of alchemical performer-audience attunement that’s a kind of symbiotic catharsis. Musically, “Sick...” is a bewitching Cramps-ian dirge, a gentle threnody. Thematically, Pop wallows alluringly in the anomic abyss, a puerile paean to the subcultural underbelly that the indefatigable Ig has embraced, and reveled in, since his emergence as lead Stooge, with anguish lurking beneath the bombast. It’s stripped down and paced just right. The horn section, excessive to the point of banality at times during this set, fits seamlessly here, inflecting the track lightly, providing grace notes, bleating plaintively at first, wafting elegiacally away as the track dissipates. The sometimes boilerplate guitar licks are more textural here, a roiling thicket of riffage, pyrotechnic.

Which brings us to “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” quite possibly this show’s highlight, with its piercingly serrated guitar parts, bass drum’s tectonic rumble, backing vocals like a sulky, nihilistic Greek chorus. The performance evokes what it must have been like to hear The Stooges for the first time, a transformative moment of emergence, of rock and roll syncretism, when a dark alloy hewn from the eviscerated, seething detritus of the blues, punk and metal, at once atavistic and incendiary, lay waste to the staid to unleash the rampaging ids of a generation in fertile flux. The solo flames out, as Iggy chants with the crowd: “I want you, baby…yeah, I know I’m gonna die…and I want you.” Desire is a generative, death-defying force.

Michael Wiener

[pop-art-sixties-seventies]

Affiche du Festival de Jazz de Montreux, 1968.

[metalcultbrigade]

On December 4th, in 1971, the Montreux Casino burned down during a concert by The Mothers of Invention after a fan had set the venue on fire with a flare gun. A recording of the outbreak and fire announcement can be found on a Frank Zappa Bootleg album titled Swiss Cheese/Fire!

The song "Smoke on the Water" by English rock group Deep Purple, who had planned to record Machine Head at the venue and whom the fire forced to seek an alternate recording location, is about the incident:

We all came out to Montreux on the Lake Geneva shoreline / To make records with a mobile - We didn't have much time / Frank Zappa & the Mothers were at the best place around / But some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground / Smoke on the water, a fire in the sky...

The Casino was subsequently rebuilt, and during the interim the Montreux Jazz Festival was held in other auditoriums in Montreux, until it could return to the newly re-opened Casino in 1975. The Festival continued to be hosted there until 1993, when it moved to the larger Montreux Convention Centre located approximately one kilometre from the Casino. From 1995 through 2006, the Festival occupied both the Convention Centre and the Casino. Beginning with the 41st Festival in 2007, nightly performances of headliners were again moved mainly to the Convention Centre, although the Casino still hosts the odd one-off show.

[fidjiefidjie]

Bon Soir 💙 🎹 🎤 👌

Ray Charles 🎶 Song For You

(Live at Montreux 1997)

[lmjupdates]

Lauren on stage at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Miami

[zef-zef]

Akira Sakata

with the Yamashita trio, probably at the Montreux Jazz Festival, July 9, 1976

source: photo123 © 📸: Dany Gignoux