FILTER SCREEN
Swiss watch
TV mini-series tells the history of Montreux Jazz Festival, via a wealth of on-stage and backstage footage.
By Lois Wilson.
Blow your own trumpet: David Bowie, who performed at MJF in 2002, has a toot on Miles Davis’s horn.
They All Came Out To Montreux
★★★★
Dir: Oliver Murray
TOWARDS THE end of the first hour-long episode of this excellent three-part documentar y about the Montreux Jazz Festival and its avuncular founder Claude Nobs, the camera focuses on a group of youths frolicking by a hotel swimming pool. It looks like something made by the Swiss tourist board, but as the camera pans across we see legendar y bluesman Champion Jack Dupree sat at the piano by the pool, then the aforesaid Nobs arrives, in swimming shorts, whips out his blues harp and the pair begin to jam wild R&B boogie while the crowd, clad in trunks and bikinis, go crazy. Turns out this is one of several impromptu performances taking place during the 1970 Montreux Jazz Festival, and it’s such spontaneous displays of joie de vivre that leads series producer Quincy Jones to call Montreux, “the Rolls-Royce of musical festivals”.