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UNESCO digs Montreux jazz archive

Thousands of hours of jazz, blues and rock from the renowned Montreux Jazz Festival dating back 45 years could be awarded UNESCO protected status, organizers said on Tuesday.

UNESCO digs Montreux jazz archive
Lana Del Rey, one of the performer's at this year's festival.

“These 5,000 hours of music represent the world’s biggest collection of taped live concerts,” said Claude Nobs, who founded the event in the Swiss Lake Geneva town in 1967.

“It’s so important that UNESCO is looking into classifying the archive as a part of our world cultural heritage,” he added, referring to the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Nobs, 76, started keeping a record of the festivals after finding out in 1968 that a Swiss television company had wiped a cassette featuring Ella Fitzgerald to record a football match.

Since then, Nobs kept his archive safe in a bunker on the grounds of his chalet in Caux, Switzerland.

Work began to digitalize the footage in 2008 and will take 15,000 hours in total.

Members of the public will soon be able to view the concerts in a specially-designed two-seater booth unveiled by Lausanne’s Ecole Polytechnique (EPFL) in Renens.

“For me the booth is a wonderful thing because I never got to see concerts
from the auditorium,” said Nobs.

“It recreates the festival atmosphere totally.”

The 46th Montreux Jazz Festival takes place this year from June 29th to July 14th and will feature Bob Dylan, Alanis Morissette, Jane Birkin and Herbie Hancock.

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CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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