 If anybody in Switzerland is passionate about what he does, it has to be Claude Nobs, the former restaurant chef who founded the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1967 and turned it into the world's biggest and most famous jazz event. His hobbies include cooking, playing the blues harmonica and collecting everything from vintage jukeboxes and model trains to Art Nouveau lamps and motorcycles. And in his not-so-spare time, he is also head of Warner Music Switzerland (whose parent company, Time Warner, also owns this magazine).
When I told Claude about my travel plans, he immediately invited me to his mountainside chalet in Caux, overlooking Montreux, to show off his collections and demonstrate his culinary skills. The chance to dine with a man who was on a first-name basis with the likes of Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, B.B. King and Quincy Jones — and who is a gourmet cook to boot — was impossible to refuse.
He greets me at the Montreux train station in his yellow Saab convertible. With his neatly brushed shock of gray hair and studious-looking glasses, he could pass for a college professor — though his puckish smile also hints at a playful, even mischievous, bent. Over lunch on the terrace of the Hotel Victoria in Glion, he explains how a simple Swiss baker's son wound up being one of the world's biggest jazz moguls.
"I was a playful kid, not very studious," he says. "When I was 17, I flunked an exam at the Ecole de Commerce de Lausanne, and my father said, 'That's it! Tomorrow you start an apprenticeship.' I knew I didn't want to be a baker, so I said, 'I'll be a chef.' He found me an apprenticeship in Basle. From that time on I was passionate about two things: cooking and jazz."
When he finished his apprenticeship, Nobs was named the number one young chef in Switzerland in 1956 and went on to the famous Ecole Hôtelière in Lausanne. But it was not his destiny to make his living as a chef. After spending a year studying in England to learn the language, he got a job as an accountant with the Montreux tourist office. In that capacity, he started putting together local blues, jazz and rock concerts, including a 1964 appearance by the fledgling Rolling Stones — "Nobody in Switzerland had ever heard of them then." In 1965, Nobs went to the U.S. for the tourist office. When he returned, he told the director of the tourist office that Americans didn't know anything about Montreux. "I told him we had to do something. He asked me if I had any ideas and I said that we should put on a jazz festival."
Starting with a budget of only $6,000, he put on the first festival in 1967 and attracted 1,200 people. Over the past 34 years, the Montreux Festival has grown into one of the world's biggest entertainment events, featuring 16 days of virtually nonstop music, both paying concerts and free off-site acts, generating countless recordings and videos, filling up every hotel room and campsite for miles around the city. Currently run by a non-profit foundation headed by Nobs, the festival boasts a $7 million annual budget funded by ticket sales and eight corporate sponsors. More than 200,000 people attended this year.
But success can breed contempt. Over the years, Nobs has been harshly criticized by purists for opening his festival beyond the confines of straight jazz to embrace electric blues, rock and so-called world music. "When I put Ten Years After on the program in 1969, jazz fans assassinated me," he chuckles. "But I saw no limit — blues, r&b, gospel. To me, jazz means an instinctive emotional sharing, an improvisational freshness."
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