The singer-songwriter teamed up with Audemars Piguet for a celebratory bash that looked to the past and cheersed to the future.
The Montreux Jazz Festival turned 60 this year, and Britain’s jazz mastermind RAYE returned to its hallowed stage for the third time, marking the anniversary with a performance in partnership with Audemars Piguet. This kind of moment calls for a celebration, a knees-up to legacy, relevance, collaboration and… time. Mine began in the event’s founder Claude Nobs’ chalets, perched on a whopping high hillside over Lake Geneva.
On the outside, these look like your bog standard (and beautiful) Swiss escapades, with a pitched roof and cosy wooden construction. But inside is more time capsule and museum than cosy mountain residence. The space is home to 10,000 different records. Weirdly, a shelf filled with model train sets, and an oddly high number of juke boxes that felt right in the founder of Montreux Jazz Festival’s place.
The event kicked off in 1967 to promote Swiss tourism in the region and blossomed into a music mecca for some of the biggest names in the business. Shania Twain lives nearby. Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” was written about the town’s casino fire in 1971, and its after-hours jam sessions see big-time music stars rock up and get down at any given moment. This is down to the hospitality of music nerd Nobs. So yes, Jukeboxes make sense.
There’s also a loft screening room, packed with 1970s first class Swiss Air Seats. Here, we plunged into the roots of Montreux Jazz Festival proper, viewing Bowie’s 2002 set and Prince belting out “Purple Rain” through 24 speakers (pretty mega stuff, and a definite mood setter). But most impressive is ‘The Bunker’, a concrete room, housing video and audio recordings from previous festival performances. (Fun fact, these archives have now been digitised with the help of Audemars Piguet, leading to the establishment of the Montreux Jazz Digital Project in 2010, which has preserved the entire sound archive of the festival which has now been acknowledged by UNESCO).
Why am I telling you all of this? Ahead of her anniversary performance, RAYE immersed herself in this world, feasting on archive headline shows to gas herself up. The performance that touches her the most is “Nina Simone in 1976,” she revealed to a group of journalists in a media roundtable ahead of the show. “I think it’s probably about as insane as it gets.”
As for what goes into throwing a megawatt anniversary performance? “I think the journey of this show is very different from anything we’ve done before in a way that I wanted to pinpoint and highlight the moments in time that have occurred on that stage in the past, and even celebrate a little moment of the future in a beautiful way too. So I’d say yes it’s very different from what I would do if it was just me in London, I just would have done the show,” Raye shared. “Don’t get me wrong, I love [that]. But this, it had to be special and specific and detailed. So a lot of that creative process has been really digging into the greats and a lot of research into you know moments in time.”
On stage during her Friday night opening slot, this research unfolded across a blockbuster performance, opening with Raye’s rendition of Nina Simone’s “Who Knows Where The Time Goes”, with further tributes paid to Miles Davis, James Brown, and Prince spliced between tracks such as “Beware.. The South London Lover Boy” from the singer’s sophomore album. But to dial up the celebrations that bit further, RAYE recruited the help of Mark Ronson for “Uptown Funk” and “Suzanne”, and tag-teamed with Alicia Keys to send the whole room berserk with bangers like “Oscar Winning Tears” before ending on “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!”.
This was a performance that both honoured the greats that have headlined the festival in the past, and also laid down her own legacy, one which attracts music lovers of all ages, spanning friends of Claude Nobs to 18-year-old Gen-Zers. So with such an emphasis on time and process, teaming up with Audemars Piguet (who RAYE has worked with collaboratively as a brand ambassador since 2025) considered part of the ‘holy trinity’ of watchmaking among collectors of killer Swiss watches feels apt. Yes, this is a celebration of history and yes both music and watchmaking are centered around keeping time, but AP stands for more than that.
Alongside supporting the Montreux Digitisation Project since 2010, it has been the Global Partner of the festival – but not how you might think. This isn’t a Swiss watch brand that only looks to legacy to move forwards (although it has got 151 years of the stuff). Audemars Piguet’s music minerals go deep. It has embedded itself within music culture. Your favourite rapper name-checks the brand and it has been the source of countless red carpet wrist checks. But through considered partnerships it has moved the needle further. Its involvement runs the whole gamut of the music world, from a 2005 collaborative Royal Oak Offshore with Jay-Z, tapping Mark Ronson and Raye to represent the brand officially, working with Travis Scott on a limited run of AP x Cactus Jack Royal Oaks in 2023, and throwing off-grid gigs through its ‘Parallel’ series that has seen Peggy Gou pull up to secret sets.
In short, these guys know music and they support music. Take it from CEO Ilaria Restawho upon seeing Raye’s first performance in 2024, where she shared the stage with Janelle Monáe, endeavoured to preserve this creative process. “We are in the business of watches. We say we are in the business of emotion. We are useless. Nobody needs a watch, but we need the emotion of what’s around the construction of that watch, and I think Claude Nobs’ chalet – you’ve been there – what is that? It’s a package of emotion where you see people coming together with no barriers, boundaries, creating together, thinking together, what’s more beautiful than that?”
The stage, held in the round (well octagon, technically) built out this partnership, mirroring the bezel of an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak and housed Raye’s 22-piece orchestra. She likened this human-made musical undertaking to hand-crafted micro-mechanical engineering of a wristwatch. “It really is this kind of throughline of what’s going on in here [the watch] and is going on inside of a song, and there’s a lot of things that people don’t hear,” Raye says. “A lot of details people don’t see. A lot of time and heart and passion [is needed] to put together a piece of music, and maybe it’s more so just feeling an alignment, but in such different worlds, and how inspiring that is, and also beautiful because [it’s] analogue.”
What watch did Raye opt for on the night? She wore her trusty, Frosted Gold Royal Oak Mini, because “it’s timeless. It’s elegant, I just love wearing it,” she says. “It’s practical, also, and very beautiful”. It’s a reinterpretation of a 1997 timepiece that has been leading the charge when it comes to women’s watch trends. With one foot in the past and another in the present, there’s nothing more fitting for her momentous Montreux hat-trick.
Words — Ollie Cox
Images courtesy of Audemars Piguet
