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Ski fall puts Montreux jazzfest director in coma

Claude Nobs, founding director of the Montreux Jazz festival, is in a coma at a Lausanne hospital after falling in a cross-country skiing accident during the Christmas holidays.

Published: 7 January 2013 15:35 CET
Ski fall puts Montreux jazzfest director in coma
Photo: Yvan Hausmann

The festival issued a statement on its website on Monday confirming that Nobs, 76, was being treated at CHUV, the university hospital, where he underwent surgery.

“He has remained to date in a state of unconsciousness,” according to the statement.

“His condition requires further tests, the results of which are not known.”

The exact circumstances of the accident were not released.

But Le Matin newspaper reported that, according to its sources, it occurred on December 24th when Nobs was skiing in Caux, a community above Montreux.

Jacqueline Pellet, a Montreux municipal councillor, earlier revealed on her Facebook site that Nobs had fallen while skiing.

Pellet said she was “profoundly saddened” by the news and hoped for good news to emerge about his recovery.

Nobs is regarded as a local hero in Montreux for his role in starting the Montreux Jazz festival, now internationally renowned as one of Europe’s top summer music events.

He organized the first festival at the age of 31 when he was director of the tourism office at Montreux, a town overlooking Lake Geneva in the canton of Vaud.

It subsequently developed into a major tour stop for top jazz artists, as well as rock and pop stars.

Nobs also became involved in the recording industry in the early 1970s when he became Swiss director of Warner, Elektra and Atlantic record companies.

The 47th annual Montreux Jazz Festival is scheduled to run from July 5th to 20th.

Festival organizers said “all necessary measures” had been taken to ensure the continued management of the festival, in accordance with plans in place for some time.

Mathieu Jaton, the festival’s secretary general, “assumes all of Claude Nobs’ responsibilities,” the festival said in its statement.

It promised to release further information about Nobs as it becomes available.

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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.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
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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