![]() ![]() “Switzerland hosted one of the world’s highest-profile yearly jazz events, the Montreux Jazz Festival (over time, mixing jazz with other kinds of pop music),” music writer Ted Lathrop says in Jazz: The First Century, but Lathrop understates the extent of that “mixing”. If it were to differ significantly, I imagined, it would be bigger and better.While “Montreux” appropriately remained part of the name used for the series of shows presented there, I found that neither “jazz” nor “festival” accurately applied. I expected the famous Montreux Jazz Festival to resemble the one that for years borrowed its name by similarly offering multiple stages where musicians young and old, established and unknown, traditional and experimental, would perform freely – and here I refer not necessarily to musicians’ playing styles but to promoters presenting gigs without requiring attendees to pay. Even so, the pairing of Montreux with Detroit lasted long enough that when many years later I took a job in Geneva, I eagerly looked forward to going to see live music at the nearby city that I grew up thinking of as jazz’s international stage. A corporate sponsor took its place for a time, before it too exited. At some point the Swiss city disappeared from the posters and T-shirts. ![]() It was called the Montreux-Detroit Jazz Festival when my parents first took me to performances I was too young to appreciate, and it still used the name later when I truly started responding to the music. ![]() Whatever formal arrangements the two very dissimilar cities made, the potent suggestion of a connection between the American event and the European one no doubt motivated organizers. Though Detroit could boast of substantial contributions to musical history, no city said “jazz” like Montreux. At more informal festivals, which occur mainly outdoors without concert hall conventions of decorum, a less buttoned-up atmosphere prevails.Or so my early experience led me to believe.In its early days in the 1980s, Detroit’s annual jazz festival sought credibility via association with Montreux. Murray’s attire seemed to hint at fundamental differences dividing festivals and concerts. Even so, a tuxedo would have seemed particularly eccentric for an afternoon riverside set. ![]() He was leading his own group for that show rather than working with the quartet. Again, they each hold their instruments and, while not wearing identical black uniforms, have their double-breasted suit coats neatly buttoned.The first time I saw Murray, the group’s tenor player, perform live, he wore sandals and blue jeans. By the other end of the decade, in the group portraits adorning 1989’s Rhythm and Blues, all four men look completely at ease as they stand together talking and laughing. Only Julius Hemphill, with one hand at his side, a smile on his face and sunglasses concealing the direction of his gaze, looks relaxed. Three – Hamiet Bluiett, Oliver Lake and David Murray – stand in almost identical positions with their hands on their horns as they look over large bowties directly into the camera. In four separate formal portraits included with the 1981 release, each looks like a holdover from another era, one when performers in evening wear would have been the norm rather than the exception. As if both to offer a sartorial contrast to their wildly adventurous sound and to suggest an orderly underpinning to their improvisations (which are deeply rooted in jazz tradition), the musicians regularly donned such suits for concerts. show the original members of the World Saxophone Quartet wearing tuxedos. Photographs decorating the Black Saint recording W.S.Q. ![]()
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