Prestige heads to the Montreux Jazz Festival with Audemars Piguet to learn about their utmost commitment to preserving and celebrating sound.
An invitation from Audemars Piguet to jet off to Swiss lakeside town of Montreux for a weekend of jazz seems like a pretty snazzy proposition. The Montreux Jazz Festival attracts some of the biggest names in the industry and, though jazz remains in its name and is at its core, the festival embraces a wide range of music: this year alone saw performances by Bob Dylan, Lionel Richie and Seal, alongside Lil Nas X, Sam Smith, Iggy Pop and more.
If we’re unsure why music is so important to Audemars Piguet, the watchmaker is making every plan to rectify that during our visit. But before Montreux and the festival, we’re taking a detour to the Jura mountains and the village of Le Brassus in the Vallée de Joux. It’s in this cradle of watchmaking that our journey really began.
We’re staying at the Hôtel des Horlogers, conveniently located right next to the Audemars Piguet headquarters, manufacture and museum. Designed by Bjarke Ingels and opened in June last year, the property stands on the site of the old Hôtel De France, a haunt of watchmakers since 1857, who’d come there from all over the Vallée de Joux to showcase and ship their watches to Geneva. Like its predecessor, the Hôtel des Horlogers is the watchmakers’ hotel and not just AP’s, through which everyone who’s central to the valley’s history – and watchmaking in particular – pass at some point.
The French windows in my bedroom open directly on to the green fields at the back of the hotel and, staring out at the vast expanse, I’m struck by just how quiet it is out here – until the silence is broken by a peal of church bells that jolt me out of my reverie and remind me of our scheduled visit to the AP Museum, where a tour arranged especially for us will demonstrate just how integral music has been to Audemars Piguet since the watchmaking house’s early days. Indeed, one of the first pieces we’re shown is a ring by Daniel Piguet, dating from around 1800, that when activated shows two automatons playing a music box.
Striking mechanisms, according to AP’s archives, have long been at the manufacture’s heart. Half of the 1,625 timepieces, pendant and pocket watches produced by the company between 1882 and 1892 featured a chiming mechanism, many of which we glimpsed at the museum. The tour also proves to be a lesson in chiming watches; we have the delightful opportunity of hearing the various melodies sounded out by some of AP’s greatest creations, from minute repeaters, which strike the hours, quarters and minutes on demand, to the Grande Sonnerie, which in addition to striking as a traditional repeater also automatically sounds the hours and each quarter hour.
In 1994, Audemars Piguet launched its first Grande Sonnerie wristwatch, and in 2015, following eight years of research and development in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the brand introduced its patented Supersonnerie technology, presented in the Royal Oak Concept Supersonnerie with an entirely redeveloped case construction that prevents sound absorption and boosts amplification. I remember that launch well, when Olivier Audemars, the great-grandson of the co-founder, introduced the concept watch to Hong Kong during Art Basel. While explaining its mechanisms, he held the watch some distance away from me, and yet, over the chatter and the din of the art fair, I could hear the crystal-clear tinkling resonating from the watch.
The sound of a repeater watch is both magic and a science. Fine-tuning a repeater is no small feat, as every minute detail affects whether the timepiece will produce a good sound or not. Such considerations include the distance between the gongs and the hammer, the shape of the gongs themselves, the materials they’re made from and how they’re tempered, where the hammers strike, how hard the hammers strike, the shape and composition of the case itself … the list goes on.
From mastering striking watches, Audemars Piguet’s ties to music have expanded beyond watchmaking and into the broader cultural landscape. Behind the move was CEO François-Henry Bennahmias, who orchestrated ground-breaking collaborations with contemporary legends in the music world. In 2005, Audemars Piguet revealed its collaboration with Jay-Z that included a specially designed watch for the rapper’s 10th anniversary in the business. In 2009, the manufacture teamed up with Quincy Jones on his Project Q initiative, helping the artist and producer raise awareness about young people’s need for self-expression. In 2022, the brand launched the Royal Oak Offshore Music Edition, which though lacking a striking mechanism celebrates music with an entirely new aesthetic. Its Tapisserie dial has been re-interpreted with a graphic-equaliser, while the crown guards are finished to resemble the fader controls of a mixing console. This year, the brand has unveiled a 37mm black ceramic version with brightly coloured interchangeable rubber straps.
And then, of course, in 2019, Audemars Piguet became the global partner of the Montreux Jazz Festival.
To get a sense of the festival’s history, the following day, we leave Le Brassus to find ourselves high on the hills at Claude Nobs Chalets, with sweeping views down towards Lake Geneva and Montreux itself. It’s here that we learn about the music extravaganza’s origins and the extraordinary feats of its late founder, Claude Nobs, whose singular vision was to record the best jazz ensembles from around the world in live concerts in the late 1960s. The visionary’s love for both the sleepy Swiss lakeside resort and jazz turned Montreux into one of the biggest and most unmissable music events of the century. Moreover, as a result of Nobs’ foresight almost half a century’s music has been recorded – more than 20,000 musicians have played at Montreux with over 11,000 hours of live music meticulously preserved and digitised by the Claud Nobs Foundation and EPFL.
Recognising its importance, Audemars Piguet began supporting the Montreux Jazz Digital Project in 2010; three years later, the archives were inscribed on the Unesco Memory of the World Register.
A visit to Claude Nobs Chalets is a rare treat and a real privilege. Nobs’ former residence has become a living shrine to his many obsessions, not only vinyl records and musical instruments, but also model trains and planes, and vintage arcade machines. The memorabilia-filled residence is testament to how important Nobs was to some of the most famous musicians of our time. Freddie Mercury gave him his piano, which stands in the basement. A toy phone autographed by Sheryl Crow takes a prime space on his work desk. Paintings and artworks by David Bowie dot the stairwells and his bedroom walls.
A few steps away from the main house is the smaller, but no less important, Le Picotin, which houses all the Montreux Jazz Festival archives. The magic lies in the attic, whose beams hide an array of speakers and microphones that pick up sound and bounces it back as though you’re standing on the Festival’s main stage in the Auditorium Stravinski. We climb the stairs to Herbie Hancock and Lang Lang’s electrifying piano duet of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Then, in a change of pace, we’re treated to David Bowie performing “Life on Mars”, and, as a finale, Prince delivering “Purple Rain”. It’s as if we’re there. We ask for an encore and are treated to Pharrell’s light-hearted and catchy “Happy”.
We’re told Sam Smith initially had reservations about being recorded at Montreux, but changed his mind after visiting Claude Nobs Chalets. We would too. Artists and musicians are known to sequester themselves at the remote Chalets for inspiration and recording. In 1971, Deep Purple was recording at Montreux as Frank Zappa was performing a set at the Montreux Casino, when a fan set off a flare that burned down the venue. The British band, seeing Lake Geneva covered in smoke, penned “Smoke on the Water”, with lyrics that go, “They burned down the gambling house/ It died with an awful sound/ Funky Claude was running in and out/ He was pulling kids out the ground now.”
If the hotel in Le Brassus was where the best watchmakers of the day would hang out, then Claude Nobs Chalet was where the world’s most celebrated musicians collided. Quincy Jones and Phil Collins have entertained there. Shania Twain stayed there in 2020.
Just think, the first festival in 1967 saw artists such as Miles Davies, Keith Jarrett, Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald perform over three days in the Montreux Casino. It was so successful that by the 1970s the festival had branched out to accommodate blues and rock. Today it spans two weeks, attracts more than 250,000 people from around the world and takes over the entire town.
The various stages are scattered around Lake Geneva and food and drink vendors line the sidewalks, serving everything from hot dogs to raclette to asado. We explore the three-storey Lake House and sip champagne in AP’s exclusive lounge, before heading over to watch our first act of the evening, the talented Brazilian singer Roberta Sá, who earned a Latin Grammy nomination for Best New Artist in 2008. Her performance demonstrates the exceptional acoustics of the Auditorium Stravinksi, the festival’s largest stage, whose intimate and personal setting has led several artists to rethink their sets. The resulting freedom to experiment new sound has made the live concerts at Montreux Jazz Festival that much more special. Following Roberta Sá, the legendary Gilberto Gil comes on to play. The 81-year-old is known for his experimental style, with music ranging from jazz, reggae and rock, to political and funk. Later, we head over to the Montreux Jazz Lab, where the energy is on a different level. The smaller venue attracts a decidedly younger crowd and is featuring the Worakls Orchetra, a rising French DJ and electronic musician who gets the room moving with his pumped-up beats.
Audemars Piguet has also found an active role with the big names pulled in by the festival each year. Last year, the manufacture introduced the Audemars Piguet Parallel programme, wherein the brand stages a series of intimate concerts in addition to the festival’s official line-up, with selected artists performing in a unique concert set-up and a contest that offers members of the public a chance to attend free-of-charge. This year’s artists include Turkish DJ Carlita, British band Metronomy and Berlin collective Keinemusik.
Sadly we miss the grand finale by Mark Ronson. The long-term AP brand ambassador joined Montreux in 2022 as part of the APXMUSIC programme, when he starred in Syncing Sounds, a three-episode series showcasing the making of “Too Much” with rising R&B artist Lucky Daye. This year, he’s back for a second chapter of Syncing Sounds, plus a new role as curator for the festival’s closing concert, where he plays alongside a group of artists and close friends.
And so, at Montreux Jazz Festival, the legacy of Claude Nobs lives on, as does that of Audemars Piguet in the Vallée du Joux, with its striking complications. Both with one eye to the past and the other to the future, celebrating the magic of sound.