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 Later in the afternoon, Claude drives me further up the mountain to his chalet, "Le Picotin," located 1,100 m above sea level. Built in 1738, it is chocolate brown with white trim and, from the outside, looks like the set for a remake of "Heidi." Inside, however, it is a kaleidoscopic museum of 20th-century pop culture. Jammed into the chalet's numerous rooms, nooks and crannies are 15 vintage jukeboxes, giant TV screens playing nonstop videos of past festival performances, motorized sculptures, multicolored Art Nouveau lamps and chandeliers, and four mint-condition motorcycles on stands — "I don't drive them, it's too dangerous on these mountain roads," says Claude. "I just like to have them as objects."
Just to prove they really work, though, Claude invites his partner Thierry to mount a cherry-red Agusta 150-hp chopper and rev up the engine. A throaty roar fills the room, along with a thick cloud of motorcycle exhaust. Claude grins with childlike glee and finally opens a door to evacuate the bluish haze of carbon monoxide.
Floor-to-ceiling display cases house hundreds, perhaps thousands, of model trains from Claude's collection. Elsewhere there are model boats and cars.
"When did you start collecting models?" I ask.
"I have always liked 3-D objects," says Claude. "I never had toys when I was a kid. As a child, my parents never had the money." A black-ceilinged music room is jammed with instruments — a Yamaha player piano, a full drum set, electric guitars on stands, a Hammond organ. "For jam sessions when musicians come up here," Claude explains. The sessions go on almost nonstop during the festival, when Claude hosts barbecues for hundreds of guests every day — and joins in on his blues harmonica. "In fact," says Claude, "musicians are dropping in all year long. Miles Davis spent a lot of time here when he was getting treatment at a clinic nearby. Phil Collins lives near here. He's also into model trains."
Behind the chalet, there is a covered pool, a fountain, a jacuzzi, a sauna, a 100-m model-train circuit, a giant working model of a Swatch wristwatch.
"Don't you ever get blasé with all this?" I ask.
"Never," Claude replies. "There's always something new. Come see this."
He takes me to the deck of the second of his three chalets, where he has a vintage binocular telescope on a tripod. He aims it at a clutch of houses several hundred meters away and focuses. "Take a look," he says. "The one with the red roof is Noël Coward's house." We sit on the deck and Claude opens a bottle of champagne as we contemplate the panorama. "I think I have a lot of luck," he muses. "I could be living in some hole with nothing. But my biggest passion is to share all this. Sharing is essential. That's what the festival is all about — sharing the music while it happens and preserving it for the future with high quality audio and video recordings."
Preserving is also what the chalet is about. In a temperature-controlled archival wing, Claude proudly shows me the steel drawers and sliding shelves that house his 30,000 CDs, 10,000 78s, 47,000 LPs and God knows how many videos. He admits that he doesn't have time to listen to more than a tiny fraction of his collection. "That doesn't matter," he says. "I know where they are." Good thing he does. When Atlantic Records decided to reissue their greatest jazz albums on CD to mark the company's 50th anniversary, they remastered several of them from Claude's mint-condition vinyls because the original tapes had been lost or destroyed.
Claude Nobs never rests. The next thing I know, he is downstairs in his spacious kitchen donning a burgundy-colored apron bearing the logo of a rival jazz festival. While an assistant heaps logs into a wood-burning stove, Claude starts chopping wild mushrooms then covers them with olive oil, salt and pepper. "My way of cooking is classic and simple, I don't like complicated things," he says. "Cooking is still a passion with me, but it's a problem of finding the time."
Did he ever dream of becoming a famous chef?
"Not really. I didn't have the gift for it. Besides, I always had to much music trotting around in my head. Actually, food and music have a lot in common. Cooking requires almost as much improvisation as jazz."
Within minutes, Claude pulls the mushrooms out of the oven and sets the dish down on a rustic dinner table. "Here," he says, "eat quickly while it's hot."
The mushrooms are delicious: browned on the outside, tender and juicy inside. To accompany his handiwork, Claude uncorks a bottle of Château L'Arrosée 1995 (grand cru classé from Saint-Emilion). The mushrooms are followed by creamed squash soup and a rare filet of beef accompanied by a sort of Swiss pasta called spaetzli. "It's Swiss beef, mind you," Claude reassures me, as he cuts the meat into perfect slices the size of hockey pucks. "No 'mad cow' disease here." I tuck into the buttery filet and wonder if Claude didn't make a mistake after all when he abandoned his professional cooking career.
The wine is flowing and Claude is regaling me with anecdotes about the great jazz musicians he has known. The name that comes up most often is Miles Davis, who was infamous for his brooding, cantankerous manner. There were few people that Miles got along with — in fact there were few people he would even talk to — but Claude Nobs was one of them. Nobs recalls the first time he met the legendary trumpeter at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1973.
"I was standing backstage one night, wearing a Tunisian shirt," says Nobs. "Miles was about to go on, and he said, in that rasping voice of his, 'Hey man, that's a nice shirt.' I said, 'You want it?' He said, 'You ain't gonna give me the shirt off your back, are you?' I said, 'Why not? It's warm out.' I gave it to him, and ever since then he was my friend."
Friend or not, Miles always demanded — and got — star treatment. Nobs recalls picking him up at the Geneva airport and driving him to Montreux. "Miles looked at my car and frowned. He said, 'Hey, man, don't you have a Ferrari to drive me around in?' I said, 'I'll see what I can do.' So I called a friend of mine who belonged to a Ferrari collectors' club, and he lent me a car. I drove to Miles' hotel and called his room from downstairs. I said, 'I got a Ferrari down here with the motor running. Come on down and take a ride.' He said, 'What color is it?' I said, 'Red, of course.' Miles said, 'Shee-yit! I wanted a black one.'
Over dessert (tarte à la crème Vandoise), I ask Claude about the future of jazz. He turns thoughtful, almost somber. "There will always be young musicians," he says. "But what's hard to find is a Coleman Hawkins, a Miles Davis. Even Wynton Marsalis — with all his force of improvisation and technique — doesn't have the same level of genius as someone less perfect like Miles. I wonder if having all these technologies doesn't diminish the level of creativity, pure and simple."
After dinner, Claude has one final piece of gadgetry to show me: a full-sized movie theater in his attic. It is fitted out with reclining Swissair airline seats, enormous stereo speakers on either side of the screen and a wall full of VCRs, DVD players, amplifiers, tape decks and video monitors that look like they were transplanted from NASA's Mission Control Center. Suddenly images of Miles, B.B. King, Nina Simone, and Stan Getz are dancing across the screen as pulsating waves of stereo sound fill the room. The images and the music are mesmerizing. And I begin to understand something about Claude's mania for collecting and archiving. Sure, it's eccentric, excessive, over the top. But at its core, it's about preserving some of life's most enjoyable and rewarding moments — be it a great musical performance or the ecstatic awe of a child surrounded by toys under the Christmas tree.
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