Rock Mountains

THE CHALETS OF CLAUDE NOBS, AMIDST ARCHIVES, COLLECTIONS AND MEMORIES OF THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE MONTREUX JAZZ FESTIVAL.

Claude Nobs was a key figure in the world of music, having founded the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1967. He passed away in 2013, but his memory lives on in his chalets in Montreux. «There are three of them», says Simon Lepêtre, event manager of Claude Nobs Chalets. «The Picotin was an old farmhouse, which Claude purchased in the 1980s and transformed as a place to welcome friends and artists. It contains the festival archives. Le Grillon is a large chalet built in 2006, while L’Éclisse is a small one for the artists, dedicated to the Canadian singer Shania Twain, who often comes here to regenerate and write. The chalets are private houses, where we organize events for lovers of art and nature». The rooms are full of objects that reflect Nobs’ passions. Guitars that once belonged to B.B. King, Carlos Santana, Nile Rodgers, John McLaughlin, and Freddie Mercury’s piano, for example. Jukeboxes, endless vinyl record collections, posters for the Montreux Festival, artworks by famous musicians (Miles Davis and Ron Wood, just to name two). Vintage lamps, a pool table, electric toy trains, and all kinds of other memorabilia. The extraordinary history of half a century of the Montreux Festival is conserved in the audio-visual archives, which Nobs organized in Le Picotin together with his partner Thierry Amsallem, now president of the Claude Nobs Foundation. The archive includes 14,000 tapes, 600 meters of shelving, 14,500 terabytes of digital files. Over the years, the festival has happened 53 times, presenting 30,000 musicians, welcoming 5 million spectators, recorded on 11,000 hours of video and 6,000 hours of audio. As Simon Lepêtre explains: «Claude always had a great passion for technology, and he made sure the concerts were recorded with the very best systems». An enormous cultural heritage, listed by UNESCO in 2013 as part of the Memory of the World.