50 Summers of Music: Montreux Jazz Festival
Arnaud Robert
398 Pages
ISBN: 978-2-84597-558-3
Montreux Jazz Festival/Editions Textuel
2016

It's neither the oldest nor the largest, but Montreux Jazz Festival is, arguably, the most famous music festival in the word. It's a notable and perhaps unlikely badge of honor for Montreux, described by Deep Purple in the early 1970s as "a sleepy little town full of old ladies and tea rooms."

To celebrate MJF's 50th edition, which was held over seventeen days in July 2016, the MJF has produced this handsome pictorial history, with illuminating mini-essays from an impressive cross-section of the musicians who have graced the MJF stages since its inception in 1967.

Even a casual perusal of the book's near-400 pages suggests that the MJF owes its fame to four principal factors: firstly, the quality and diversity of the music; secondly, the hundreds of live recordings from the MJF's unrivalled audio-visual archive that have been released since the late 1960s; thirdly, the hospitality accorded the musicians; finally, the late Claude Nobs, one of the MJF's original founders, and for forty seven years, a tireless ambassador for the festival and the tiny Swiss town of Montreux.

There's also the beauty of the festival's location, in itself a major draw for musicians and music lovers alike. Nestled on the shoreline of Lake Geneva, with vine- clad hills at its shoulder and Alpine mountains facing it across the water, Montreux is little short of idyllic. Danny Ginoux's double-page portrait of