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Montreux Casino ( Casino Barrière de Montreux) is a casino located in Montreux, Switzerland on the shoreline of Lake Geneva. It has served as the venue for the Montreux Jazz Festival and was rebuilt following a 1971 fire memorialized in the Deep Purple song "Smoke on the Water". It is a property of Groupe Lucien Barrière. The casino housed Mountain Studios which has since become the museum .
In 1967, the casino became the venue for the Montreux Jazz Festival, which was started by music promoter Claude Nobs. The three-day festival was held there annually and featured performers such as Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, Bill Evans, Nina Simone, Jan Garbarek, Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald. Originally featuring almost exclusively jazz artists, in the 1970s the festival began to include blues, Soul music, and rock artists such as Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and Deep Purple.
English rock group Deep Purple, who had planned to record Machine Head at the venue, were forced to seek an alternate recording location. Their song "Smoke on the Water" was written about the incident:
Frank Zappa calmly urged the concert attendees to evacuate. Mothers vocalist Mark Volman, cracking a joke in the process, added "Fire! Arthur Brown in person." Zappa continued, "If you'll just calmly go to the exits, ladies and gentlemen." The fire brigade was on scene in less than five minutes. The fire quickly spread out of control but, due to the orderly evacuation and the swift assistance of firefighters, no one was killed in the incident.
The casino was rebuilt, and until the venue reopened in 1975, the Montreux Jazz Festival was held in other auditoriums in Montreux. The festival continued to be hosted there until 1993, when it moved to the larger Montreux Convention Centre located approximately one kilometre from the casino. From 1995 through 2006, the festival occupied both the convention centre and the casino. Beginning with the 41st festival in 2007, nightly performances of headliners were again moved mainly to the convention centre, although the casino still occasionally hosts shows.
Within the newly rebuilt casino was Mountain Studios which recorded the Jazz Festival's live performances. In 2013, the studio was replaced by exhibit .
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