Go Play It on The Mountain: Music at Montreux

CLASSICAL TV'S FREE "BEST OF MONTREUX" SPECIAL: HISTORIC VIDEOS FEATURING JOHNNY CASH, RAY CHARLES, AND JAMES BROWN!

THE YEAR IS 1967. The place is Switzerland, land of litter-free streets and alpine scenery, precision clockworks and inviolable social order. And the irony is irresistible: a Swiss bureaucrat — an accountant, at that — dreams up a prestigious annual event honoring the musical genre that’s all about spontaneity, improvisation and the subversion of rules. Welcome to the Montreux Jazz Festival, a uniquely Swiss shrine to a uniquely American art. Delicious, no?

Delicious, yes, but also misleading. Thanks to his father’s extensive collection of 78s, Festival founder Claude Nobs was already a jazz aficionado when he began training as a chef in his teens. Later, when Nobs was working in finance for the Montreux Tourism Office, job-related travel and international networking enabled him to sideline as a concert organizer. In New York he visited the jazz bastion Atlantic Records, where he met Roberta Flack and invited her back to Montreux for the Rose d’Or television contest. That, some say, was the beginning. The Festival didn’t exist yet, but its distinctive hallmarks were already there: internationalism, passion, and a seriousness that ignores stylistic boundaries, exalting the music and the act of listening.

JAMES BROWN AT MONTREUX, 1981  FREE

The result is an oddly utopian musical democracy where there is no divide between mass culture and high art — no wall between, say, classic jazz and the soul singing of James Brown. They have their differences, but share their blues roots, improvisational techniques, and coded eroticism. And they both swing. Brown had hits and influenced music throughout the world, but his 1981 concert at Montreux shows why his music must be seen as well as heard: the amazing moves and the sweat that goes with them are all part of the funk in hits like I Got You; Please, Please, Please; and Sex Machine.

JOHNNY CASH AT MONTREUX, 1994  FREE

Johnny Cash, another Montreux veteran, remains the most authoritative and recognizable voice in Country & Western music. You can’t get much further from jazz orthodoxy, or from Swiss cosmopolitanism; but the sine qua non at Montreux is authenticity, and this he had in boundless supply. To watch Cash’s 1994 performance at the Festival is to understand how fully he belonged there. That special Cash sound — resonant and dangerous, like an abandoned well — is magnified by the venue in classics such as Folsom Prison Blues and Ring of Fire. Cash’s wife and longtime musical partner June Carter Cash, already C&W royalty when they married, joins him in their landmark hit Jackson. With the participation of their son John in Will the Circle Be Unbroken, this set is all about keeping C&W real.

RAY CHARLES AT MONTREUX, 1997  FREE

And what brought Ray Charles and the Raelettes back to Montreux over and over again? Like James Brown, Ray Charles was a pioneer of soul music — an American master whose genius was universally acknowledged, but never successfully pigeonholed. Though never classified as a jazz artist, he was always welcome at Montreux, and his distinctive way with a song seemed very much at home there. To hear his standards such as Georgia on My Mind, You Made Me Love You, What’d I Say, and Busted at the Festival — sung before an audience of reverential listeners — is to hear them as if for the first time.

AND DON'T MISS: NINA SIMONE LIVE AT MONTREUX IN 1976  $4.99

Photo: James Brown, by Getty Images