Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water is essentially a police blotter set to a riff: a report of the Montreux Casino burning down during a Frank Zappa concert in December 1971 after someone fired a flare gun into the ceiling. That fire becomes the metaphor for this episode’s story of how a three-day local event in 1967 grew into the second largest jazz festival on the planet, behind only Montreal. Spearheaded by Claude Nobs, Géo Voumard and René Langel with the backing of a tourism office led by Raymond Jaussi, the festival secured an anchor tenant in Atlantic Records’ Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun and opened with Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald, offering American jazz artists the reverence and pin-drop silence they rarely received at home.

The hosts explain how Nobs cross-subsidized pure jazz with stadium rock and blues, used Brazilian artists like Gilberto Gil and Elis Regina as a bridge to fusion, and booked Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Santana, Peter Tosh and even The Dubliners. Quincy Jones co-produced from 1991 to 1993, stretching the event to three weeks, pushing attendance from roughly 75,000 in 1980 to over 120,000 by 1994, and bringing Run-DMC, Ice-T, Prince, David Bowie, Korn, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash under one banner by treating jazz as a verb. The episode covers the venue shuffle to the convention center’s Auditorium Stravinski and Miles Davis Hall, concerts on Lake Geneva boats and Alpine trains, a stage built over the lake during the 2023 to 2025 renovation, posters by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean Tinguely, sustainability engineering, the unmatched Live at Montreux catalog from more than 1,300 artists including B.B. King’s 21 and Herbie Hancock’s 27 appearances, and the Montreux Jazz Artists Foundation competitions judged by the likes of Fazil Say, Lee Ritenour and Patti Austin.

• The 1971 casino fire and the origin of Smoke on the Water
• How Atlantic Records’ backing let a tiny town book jazz royalty in year one
• Using rock revenue to keep paying jazz legends
• The Quincy Jones era and the argument for jazz as an ethos rather than a genre
• Why Live at Montreux became the gold standard for live albums