Montreux Jazz Festival on the Shore of Lake Geneva

Montreux was a lakeside resort long before it had a festival, known for grand hotels, a mild climate and the palms that grow along its quay. In 1967, Claude Nobs, who worked at the local tourist office, set up a jazz festival with Géo Voumard and René Langel, helped by contacts at Atlantic Records. The first edition lasted three days and was held in the old Montreux Casino.

It grew quickly. Bill Evans recorded a live album at the 1968 festival that went on to win a Grammy, and other musicians followed. Through the 1970s, the programme stretched to take in blues, soul, rock and Brazilian music. Nobs, a charismatic host who often joined musicians on stage with a harmonica, ran the festival for more than four decades until his death in 2013. Since then, Mathieu Jaton has directed it.

In the early 1990s, Quincy Jones co-produced the festival for three years. His best-remembered moment at Montreux came in 1991, when he conducted an orchestra behind Miles Davis in a performance of the Gil Evans arrangements Davis had recorded decades earlier, one of the trumpeter’s last major concerts.

The best-known story about Montreux happened by accident. On 4 December 1971, during a concert by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, someone in the audience fired a flare into the ceiling of the Montreux Casino, and the building burned down. Deep Purple, who had come to Montreux to record with a mobile studio, watched the smoke spread across the lake from their hotel. They turned the evening into Smoke on the Water, with its line about “Funky Claude” running in and out to pull people from the fire, a nod to Nobs, who helped get young fans out of the building.

The casino was rebuilt and reopened a few years later. The song made Montreux a household name among rock fans who had never heard of its jazz festival, and Deep Purple have returned to the festival several times since, including for the 60th edition in 2026.

Montreux has a habit of ending up on album covers. Because Nobs had shows recorded and filmed with care, many artists released their sets from the festival. Ella Fitzgerald’s Montreux ‘75, Nina Simone’s 1976 concert, Marvin Gaye’s set from 1980 and many others circulate as live recordings, and for some musicians a Montreux album became one of the defining documents of their career. Rock and blues followed, with B.B. King, Carlos Santana, Leonard Cohen and David Bowie among the names who appeared on its stages over the decades.

The pattern still holds. Artists who play Montreux know the cameras are running and that the sound will be carefully recorded, and some shape their sets with that in mind. For the audience, it lends the main concerts a sense of occasion that a typical summer festival rarely has.

The festival runs for about two weeks in the first half of July. For the 60th edition in 2026, it took place from 3 to 18 July. Over that period, it draws more than 200,000 visitors.

Many of them spend their afternoons outdoors, and that is the best way to begin a day at the Montreux Jazz Festival. The quay between the convention centre and the town centre becomes a festival mile of food stands, bars and open-air stages, with DJ sets, local bands and student ensembles. Music also moves off the shore. Jazz boats take passengers out on the lake with bands on deck, and special trains carry musicians and audiences up into the hills behind the town. Most of this is free, and much of the audience is local families, students and day-trippers from Lausanne and Geneva.

Here the festival keeps its competitions too. Young pianists, singers and guitarists from around the world compete in international contests held during the festival, and several musicians who won or reached the final have since built international careers.

The headline concerts happen indoors at the Montreux Music and Convention Centre on the lakefront, which contains the Auditorium Stravinski, the largest hall, and the smaller Miles Davis Hall. The building closed for renovation in July 2023, and for several editions the biggest concerts moved to a temporary stage built over the lake. The festival returned to the renovated centre in 2026 with redesigned stages.

Line-ups mix jazz greats with rock, pop, soul, hip-hop and electronic acts. The 2026 programme included Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Sting, Raye, James Taylor and Van Morrison alongside jazz artists. Tickets for the main halls are sold online when the programme is announced in spring, and the best-known names sell out fast. Smaller shows, sometimes with seated audiences of a few hundred, are often where long-time visitors find the most memorable evenings.

If you are going for one particular artist, buy as soon as the line-up is announced.

When the main concerts end, the festival keeps going. Late-night jam sessions, open to musicians who turn up with an instrument, run into the small hours, and festival artists have been known to drop in after their own shows. The lakeside bars stay busy, and at two in the morning there are still people on the quay, listening to whatever is playing.

The festival has also kept a record of most of what has happened on its stages. Nobs had concerts filmed and recorded from the early years, and the result is a huge audiovisual collection of live performances. In 2013, it was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

Montreux is pleasant even without music. A walk south along the lake leads to the Château de Chillon, a medieval castle built on a rock in the water. Its dungeon, where the Genevan monk François Bonivard was held in the sixteenth century, inspired Lord Byron’s poem The Prisoner of Chillon, and Byron’s name is carved into one of the pillars.

A short aside, since visitors keep stopping there to take photographs: on the quay near the market hall stands a bronze statue of Freddie Mercury, arm raised, facing the lake. Queen recorded at Mountain Studios in Montreux, which the band owned for years, and Mercury spent long periods in the town. The statue was unveiled in 1996 and fans still leave flowers at its base.

West of the town, the Lavaux vineyard terraces climb the hillside above the lake towards Lausanne. They have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2007, and walking paths link the wine villages, with tastings in cellars along the way. In the other direction, scenic trains climb into the hills and towards the Bernese Oberland, where the Jungfrau Marathon takes runners up to the Eiger glacier each September.

Montreux is on the main railway line along the north shore of Lake Geneva, about an hour by direct train from Geneva Airport and around 20 minutes from Lausanne. Hotels in town fill up early for the festival, and many visitors stay in Vevey, Lausanne or in villages along the line, returning by train in the evening. Swiss trains run late during the festival period, but checking the last connection is worthwhile.

Getting around during the festival is simple. The convention centre, the lakeside stages and the town centre lie along the same stretch of quay, so most visitors walk everywhere and only use buses or trains to reach their beds. Vevey, a few stops west, is a calmer base with its own lakefront and market square. Charlie Chaplin spent the last decades of his life in Corsier-sur-Vevey, just above the town, and his former home is now a museum, Chaplin’s World, while a statue of him stands by the water.

Families are well catered for. Daytime concerts by the lake suit children, and the promenade is pedestrian for most of its length, though it becomes very crowded on weekend evenings.

July weather on the lake is usually warm, with occasional thunderstorms in the afternoon; a light jacket helps for evenings on the water. Food at the stalls ranges from Swiss raclette to dishes from around the world.

For readers who like their festivals small and unusual, the Bluff Oyster and Food Festival in New Zealand is a very different kind of gathering, and the Mediterranean glamour of Monte Carlo and Monaco Ville is a long day’s train ride to the south. More events are collected in the events section.

The official programme for each year is published on the festival website, usually in spring, and ticket sales open the same day.