As the Montreux Jazz Festival turns 60, a new book celebrates its unique appeal to artists and audiences alike

If the mountains can’t go to the musicians, why don’t the musicians come to the mountains? So wondered a young Claude Nobs, just starting out in his career in local tourism, after he was charged with driving more US business to the lakeside city of Montreux, at the foot of the Swiss Alps. Combining his love of jazz with corporate America’s taste for international junketing proved a smart move: 60 years after Nobs staged the first three-day event, the Montreux Jazz Festival has grown to become a weeks-long linchpin of the international live circuit, its bill today less jazz-centric than in earlier years, but still aimed at audiences galvanised by artists of a more improvisational and/or searching bent.

Its continuing attraction to US musicians, however, remains unabated – beautifully documented in the many informal portraits captured by Tehran-born, Swiss-based photographer Anoush Abrar, the festival’s official photographer since 2018. Taking full advantage of the introduction of an outdoor stage built directly over the Montreux waterfront, Abrar follows in the footsteps of the festival’s founder in diligently documenting the artists who pass through (Nobs, who died in 2013, instigated a unique audio/visual record of festival performances maintained to this day).

Along the way, Abrar shares his stories of meeting many of the giants of 20th-century music; perhaps the most gigantic of all was Quincy Jones, the festival’s music director from 1991 to 1993, who returned each summer thereafter until shortly before his death in 2024. In 2019, the groundbreaking composer/arranger/producer was honoured with a gala evening on the festival’s closing night. This was his final appearance at the festival and one Abrar witnessed backstage, where he pictured Jones, trumpet in hand, surrounded by a cohort of musicians to whom he was effectively handing on the baton. This plus hundreds more images captured both on and off-stage reveal similar interactions between performers young and old, established and emerging, the presence of whom continues to underline the festival’s unique place in the global cultural calendar.

Since 2019 Audemars Piguet has served as Global Partner of the Montreux Jazz Festival, building on a relationship started in 2010 when the Swiss watchmaker supported the development of the Montreux Jazz Digital Project, focused on digitising, restoring and preserving the festival’s entire sound archives, recognised by UNESCO as part of its ‘memory of the world’.

The Elegance of Time is available at montreuxjazzshop.com