1978
The Festival first went international with this poster produced in collaboration with the São Paulo Festival in Brazil. The bossa nova stars who performed at Montreux in 1978, including Gilberto Gil, would go on to become Festival regulars. Claude Nobs understandably entrusted the design to Brazilian architect and visual artist Walter Ono, whose poster plays with axial symmetry and complementary colours, representing the distant latitudes between the two host locations as a reflection in the lake. The design evokes the rationalist geometry of modernist architecture infiltrated by the sensual, improvised curves of jazz and bossa nova.
