From Aretha Franklin or Ray Charles to David Bowie or Prince, more than 5,000 concerts have been recorded LIVE both in audio and video since the creation of the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1967.

In 2013, UNESCO has inscribed the Montreux Jazz Festival audio and visual collection in its international Memory of the World Register, the documentary equivalent of “World Heritage”.

“They All Came Down To Montreux”

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Claude Nobs Legacy

a Swiss Foundation recognized as public utility by the Swiss authorities.

The Claude Nobs Foundation oversees the curation and conservation of Claude Nobs’ audio & visual archives, which is one of the World’s largest collection of “live” music recordings – all of which was recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival (Switzerland) since 1967.  Having started with jazz in the early days, over the next 55 years, the collection has grown and enriched itself with new genres of music ranging from blues and rock, to rap, soul, Latin and many more.

UNESCO Memory of the World

Today the library has become one of the largest testimonies of live music in the World, with over 5,000 individual performances.  The collection is unequaled and has a universal significance for current and future generations.   As a result, in June 2013, it was inscribed to UNESCO international Memory of the World Register, the documentary equivalent of “World Heritage”.

The Montreux Digital Project

In 2007, Claude Nobs and Thierry Amsallem joined forces with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) to create a unique, first of its kind, high resolution digital archive of the Festival. Considered both as an educational tool and research infrastructure, this audiovisual heritage has become a unique platform for students and researchers to innovate in fields such as acoustics, data science, archiving, musicology, museology, or neurosciences. Driven by the EPFL Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center, the “Montreux Jazz Digital Project” is an accelerator for innovation in technology, culture, social sciences and open science.

DNA Data Storage Alliance

As member of the DNA Data Storage Alliance, we are committed to the future use of synthetic DNA to solve global data storage problems. We contribute to inform about this exciting new way of preserving and accessing the zettabytes of valuable information needed in the world to preserve our unfolding human narrative. Iconic performances of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” and Miles Davis’ “Tutu” performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival were stored on DNA for the first time in 2017.

AND FOR THE ARTISTS.