Switzerland and All that Jazz

If you respond with a blank stare when someone tells you that Switzerland is known for its jazz, you and I have something in common.

My inner monologue, in that moment: Known for its jazz by who?

The History of Jazz in Switzerland

And yet—they weren’t lyin’.

Turns out that Switzerland turned on to jazz very early in the American musical form’s history after a laudatory 1919 article about Will Marion Cook’s Syncopated Orchestra. (What a band name, eh?)

Swiss radio immediately began playing jazz music and Swiss musicians picked up the form, with the first Swiss jazz bands taking the stage in the early 1920s.

Louis Armstrong swung over to Switzerland in 1935, followed by several over US jazz musicians. (Some of them stayed!)

The Second World War brought several jazz musicians to Switzerland as well, fleeing occupied territories in Germany and France. The jazz-musician exchanges of the prewar era, followed by the longer stays and permanent residences of the war times, solidified even further jazz as an art form in the country.

After the war, jazz diversified further in Switzerland, bifurcating into what’s known as “Dixieland” jazz and what we’d consider more modern jazz. (Eventually, as it did almost everywhere, Dixieland effectively became passé and died out.)

Experiencing Jazz in Switzerland Today

Dixieland jazz may have died out everywhere, effectively, but jazz is still alive and well in Switzerland.

The city of Bern is home to the first autonomous university focused on jazz music in Europe—even offering bachelor’s degrees—and the town of Montreux is famed for the jazz festival founded there in 1967 that today attracts an absolutely astounding 250,000 people each midsummer.

Montreux’s example is just the largest of the options. If you prefer a more intimate jazz festival experience, you can ease your way into the mere 20,000 people who attend the annual jazz festival in Bern or you can even tune into the latest in Swiss jazz at Lausanne’s annual JazzOnze+ festival, which has been running since 1987.

There isn’t a distinctive style of Swiss jazz, though. The country is proudly divided into regions with often highly distinct cultures and has four official languages. Music in the country is equally diverse in all forms, including jazz.

Jazz Lovers, Come Visit

All that diversity of styles means that jazz fans should plan a trip to Switzerland at a time that overlaps with one of the country’s jazz festivals to soak up all the flavors and see which contemporary Swiss (and international!) musicians they love the most.

Here’s where I confess that I am not proficient enough in jazz music to have soaked up all the style’s goodness during my Swiss life and travels. Something I should rectify, you think?