{"id":2047918,"date":"2026-07-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2047918"},"modified":"2026-07-17T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T21:00:00","slug":"wonderland-273","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2047918","title":{"rendered":"Wonderland"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\t\t\tWonderland<\/span>
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\n\t\t\tRAYE TOASTS TIME AT MONTREUX JAZZ FESTIVAL\u00a0<\/span>
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The singer-songwriter teamed up with Audemars Piguet for a celebratory bash that looked to the past and cheersed to the future.\u00a0<\/h3>\n
\"Raye<\/figure>\n

The Montreux Jazz Festival turned 60 this year, and Britain\u2019s 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\u2026 time. Mine began in the event\u2019s founder Claude Nobs\u2019 chalets, perched on a whopping high hillside over Lake Geneva.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s place. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201cSmoke on the Water\u201d was written about the town\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Raye<\/figure>\n

There\u2019s 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\u2019s 2002 set and Prince belting out \u201cPurple Rain\u201d through 24 speakers (pretty mega stuff, and a definite mood setter). <\/strong>But most impressive is \u2018The Bunker\u2019, a concrete room, housing video and audio recordings from previous festival performances.\u00a0(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).\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 \u201cNina Simone in 1976,\u201d she revealed to a group of journalists in a media roundtable ahead of the show. \u201cI think it\u2019s probably about as insane as it gets.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

As for what goes into throwing a megawatt anniversary performance? \u201cI think the journey of this show is very different from anything we\u2019ve 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\u2019d say yes it\u2019s very different from what I would do if it was just me in London, I just would have done the show,\u201d Raye shared. \u201cDon\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Raye<\/figure>\n
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\"Raye<\/figure>\n
\"Raye<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n

On stage during her Friday night opening slot, this research unfolded across a blockbuster performance, opening with Raye\u2019s rendition of Nina Simone\u2019s \u201cWho Knows Where The Time Goes\u201d, with further tributes paid to Miles Davis, James Brown, and Prince spliced between tracks such as \u201cBeware.. The South London Lover Boy\u201d from the singer\u2019s sophomore album. But to dial up the celebrations that bit further, RAYE recruited the help of Mark Ronson for \u201cUptown Funk\u201d and \u201cSuzanne\u201d, and tag-teamed with Alicia Keys to send the whole room berserk with bangers like \u201cOscar Winning Tears\u201d before ending on \u201cWHERE IS MY HUSBAND!\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 \u2018holy trinity\u2019 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Alongside supporting the Montreux Digitisation Project since 2010, it has been the Global Partner of the festival \u2013\u00a0but not how you might think. This isn\u2019t a Swiss watch brand that only looks to legacy to move forwards (although it has got 151 years of the stuff). Audemars Piguet\u2019s 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 \u2018Parallel\u2019 series that has seen Peggy Gou pull up to secret sets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Raye<\/figure>\n

In short, these guys know music and they support music. Take it from CEO Ilaria Restawho upon seeing Raye\u2019s first performance in 2024, where she shared the stage with Janelle Mon\u00e1e, endeavoured to preserve this creative process. \u201cWe 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\u2019s around the construction of that watch, and I think Claude Nobs\u2019 chalet \u2013\u00a0 you\u2019ve been there \u2013\u00a0what is that? It\u2019s a package of emotion where you see people coming together with no barriers, boundaries, creating together, thinking together, what\u2019s more beautiful than that?\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 22-piece orchestra. She likened this human-made musical undertaking to hand-crafted micro-mechanical engineering of a wristwatch. \u201cIt really is this kind of throughline of what\u2019s going on in here [the watch] and is going on inside of a song, and there\u2019s a lot of things that people don\u2019t hear,\u201d Raye says. \u201cA lot of details people don\u2019t see. A lot of time and heart and passion [is needed] to put together a piece of music, and maybe it\u2019s more so just feeling an alignment, but in such different worlds, and how inspiring that is, and also beautiful because [it\u2019s] analogue.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

What watch did Raye opt for on the night? She wore her trusty, Frosted Gold Royal Oak Mini, because \u201cit\u2019s timeless. It\u2019s elegant, I just love wearing it,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s practical, also, and very beautiful\u201d. It\u2019s a reinterpretation of a 1997 timepiece that has been leading the charge when it comes to women\u2019s watch trends. With one foot in the past and another in the present, there\u2019s nothing more fitting for her momentous Montreux hat-trick.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Words<\/strong> \u2014 Ollie Cox
Images<\/strong> courtesy of Audemars Piguet<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t17 July 2026\t\t\t<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\tWhat\u2019s In My Perfume Tin?<\/span> <\/span><\/a>\t\t\t<\/div>\n
\n\t\t\t\tThis is the cottage you\u2019ll want to visit this summer<\/span> <\/span><\/a>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wonderland RAYE TOASTS TIME AT MONTREUX JAZZ FESTIVAL\u00a0 The singer-songwriter teamed up with Audemars Piguet for a celebratory bash that looked to the past and cheersed to the future.\u00a0 The Montreux Jazz Festival turned 60 this year, and Britain\u2019s jazz mastermind RAYE returned to its hallowed stage for the third time, marking the anniversary with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,257],"class_list":["post-2047918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-wonderlandmagazine-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2047918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2047918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2047918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2047918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2047918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2047918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}