Montreux Jazz archives at UNESCO
In 2010, the Montreux Jazz Festival, EPFL and Audemars Piguet joined forces to digitize, restore and preserve the precious archives of the Montreux Jazz Festival. The collection has just become the first audiovisual library to be included in UNESCO's "Memory of the World" register.
Ensuring that Claude Nobs' legacy lives on for years to come, his companion Thierry Amsallem has announced the creation of the Claude Nobs Foundation, whose aim is to preserve and make accessible to all a priceless collection of live recordings spanning almost half a century of musical history.
Claude Nobs' vision was to build a musical legacy for generations to come. He had bought the first archives from Swiss Television when he realized that some had been erased and replaced by a soccer match. Since then, he has personally ensured that all concerts are systematically recorded and filmed. This legacy represents almost 5,000 hours of live audiovisual recordings spanning almost half a century of the festival's history, from 1967 to 2012. It's a unique collection that Quincy Jones has described as "the greatest testimony to the history of music, spanning jazz, blues and rock".
