Montreux Jazz Festival reinvents format for 2024

Montreux Jazz Festival (MJF) has unveiled a reimagined layout for its 58th edition while its traditional main venue undergoes construction work.

Set to be held from 5-20 July 2024, the storied Swiss event is reinventing itself in the town with an extended route along the quay, plus a brand-new 5,000-cap stage to be built on top of Lake Geneva itself.

It will also see a return to the Casino, where the festival started in 1967, along with a large number of free stages as it continues to accommodate its usual 250,000 capacity across the duration of the event. The Casino Stage will have a capacity of 1,300 and a half-seated, half-standing configuration.

The changes have been made due to construction work on the Montreux Music and Convention Centre Congress Centre (2m2c), which usually hosts the festival’s major shows, with work scheduled to continue until 2025. A stage was previously created on the lake in 2021.

“It was very clear when we came back in ’22 that we were going to bring in a lot of changes to transform the festival and take it into the future”

“It is never business as usual at Montreux,” MJF CEO Mathieu Jaton told IQ earlier this year. “It was very clear when we came back in ’22 that we were going to bring in a lot of changes to transform the festival and take it into the future. And ’24 will be another challenge because we have to move the festival from the Congress Centre as [redevelopment] work will be starting just after the festival this summer.”

The reigning top festival (Ligger’s Favourite Festival) at ILMC’s Arthur Awards, the Swiss festival pulled in around 250,000 fans to the shores of Lake Geneva this year for its combination of free and ticketed concerts.

Artists included Bob Dylan, Lionel Richie, Lil Nas X, Sam Smith, Simply Red, Iggy Pop, Generation Sex, Norah Jones, Seal, Joe Bonamassa, Nile Rodgers & Chic and Mark Ronson.

MJF was the subject of the 2023 documentary mini-series, They All Came Out To Montreux, which premiered in the UK earlier this month on BBC Four and BBC iPlayer. The three-part doc details the history of the event and its legendary founder Claude Nobs, who died in January 2013 following a skiing accident. Jaton speaks about Nobs’ enduring legacy here.

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