The Montreux Jazz Festival has returned to the great crowds of the pre-Covid era. Its 56th edition, which ends on Saturday evening, welcomed more than 250,000 people. The quality of the 2022 poster, a reinvented site and 16 consecutive days of sunshine explain this success.
“The gods of the show and the weather were with us this year”, rejoiced Friday in front of the press the boss of the MJF Mathieu Jaton. ‘I am delighted, radiant, over the moon. There are so many emotions in me following two years of pandemic and uncertainty, he said on the stage of the new Memphis club in the new Montreux Lake House, before breaking down and bursting into tears.
After the broadcast of a ‘best of’ of the fortnight on video, Mathieu Jaton had time to come to his senses and continue with the key figures of this 2022 edition ‘outside the norm’ rather than ‘back to normal’ . With a total of more than 250,000 festival-goers for sixteen sunny days – “as the people demand” – attendance is in the “high range, even bordering on MJF attendance records”, said its big boss.
The festival reached its ticketing budget on Friday, the day before the last evening. With 17 sold-out concerts – ten at the Auditorium Stravinski (4,000 seats) and seven at the Montreux Jazz Lab (2,000 seats) – and an ‘exceptional’ occupancy rate of 85%, this edition has ‘recorded one of the best attendance at paying theaters over the past ten years,” said Mathieu Jaton.
‘Three slaps’
From July 1 to 16, the event hosted some 70 artists on its two paying stages, including a-ha, Nick Cave, Björk, Paolo Nutini, Gregory Porter, Jacques and Thomas Dutronc, Diana Ross, Woodkid, Maneskin, The Smile, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Ibrahim Maalouf, Jeff Beck with Johnny Depp or even Herbie Hancock closing on Saturday evening.
The director’s favorites for this 56th edition? ‘Spontaneously, three slaps: the concerts of the Romande Emilie Zoé, the American Marc Rebillet and the Israeli Asaf Avidan’.
In total, on paid and free stages, some 550 concerts and musical activities with no less than 3,000 musicians have been programmed, including more than 450 concerts of the ‘off’ festival. Thirty concerts were broadcast live on the internet (live streaming). In its new format, the MJF offered eleven free stages, including the new Ipanema, an open-air electro nightclub.
Finances smile too
If these figures make you dizzy in the heat wave, they above all evoke the “radiant reunion” of the public with the MJF “in a reinvented format”. ‘The magic of the MJF has once once more worked’, welcomes his boss. He praised the “extraordinary enthusiasm of the public” who “completely appropriated the new free places”.
On the financial side, the balance sheet also looks encouraging. The budget of 27 million francs for this 2022 edition, almost the equivalent of the budget of the pre-Covid edition of 2019, will be respected. The accounts will be balanced or even certainly in the black figures, according to the director. With such sunny weather, food and beverage sales far exceeded targets.
Successful bet for the Lake House
Great novelty, the Lake House, in the Petit Palais, also gave full satisfaction to the organizers. Supposed to transform the free offer, it perfectly played its role as a central meeting place for non-paying scenes, according to them.
An incubator of culture and art, the Lake House housed eight rooms, including a library, a cinema, a gallery and even a boudoir. It usually quietly came alive from 5:00 p.m. to become ‘the place to be’ at the very end of the evening and until 5:00 in the morning. The Memphis and its concerts of young jazz artists and La Coupole with its jam sessions were a success.
This site should in the future become emblematic of the MJF, especially since the 2m2c Congress Center in Montreux will be undergoing renovations in 2024 and 2025. Mathieu Jaton promised ‘surprises and wonder’ for the edition of 2024, therefore deprived of Stravinsky and the Lab, ensuring that the MJF ‘will remain in Montreux’.
He does not rule out reinstalling a stage on the shores of Lake Geneva, as during the resized edition of 2021. ‘More than ever, we want to emphasize the quality and the musical experience experienced by festival-goers’ , concludes Mathieu Jaton. The 57th edition of the MJF will take place from June 30 to July 15, 2023.
/ATS
