The story
Montreux Jazz Festival in Montreux
Montreux Jazz Festival began in 1967 as a modest lakeside jazz gathering launched by promoter Claude Nobs and grew into one of the world's best-known music festivals, the kind of event where a 1971 casino fire inspired Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water. Each edition spans the Auditorium Stravinski, the smaller Montreux Jazz Lab and free lakeside stages along Lake Geneva. Genres now stretch well past jazz into rock, blues, hip-hop and electronic music.
In 1967, Swiss music promoter Claude Nobs launched a modest jazz gathering at the Montreux Casino on Lake Geneva, and the event grew into one of the most storied music festivals in the world, the kind of place where Deep Purple watched the casino burn down in 1971 and later wrote Smoke on the Water about it.