The Temperance Movement and Deep Purple shook the Auditorium Stravinski of Montreux Jazz Festival with some mind blowing blues-rock and hard-rock on Wednesday 4th of July.

 

8pm-9.15pm

The Temperance Movement

As soon as British band The Temperance Movement starts playing, the audience is immersed in addictive and colourful blues-rock sounds. Guitar riffs lead the way during most of the gig, played with sliders, creating that typical watery sound of blues guitars. Keyboards and drums follow up keeping the rhythm and powering up the pace.

The band creates a great atmosphere involving the public in singing along and such. The rhythm of their songs, constantly changing and powerful gets you following their wave. Scottish singer Phil Campbell friendly tells jokes to the audience.

The Temperance Movement also plays some nice blues ballads nice, one of which on the piano with the singer embodying John Lennon.

Impossible to stay still during this gig as the sounds carry you away and cuddle you in a warm hug.

10pm-11.45pm

Deep Purple

The screen at the back of the stage shows an iceberg with the faces of the five members of Deep Purple carved on it.

The countdown starts and then the room darkens as a majestic classic music is played. The stage gets slightly lighter to show Deep Purple on stage, that straight away get the audience hooked on their rock sound. Don Airey with his impressive set of keyboards shows he is a master, from playing classical tunes on the piano to jamming with high-pitched keys sounds.

Throughout the concert, the screen at the back of the stage shows live footage of the gig as well as pre-made animations and videos. Singer Ian Gillan interacts with the audience by introducing some of the songs.

Some songs have more of a blues-rock influence whereas others are more oriented towards hard rock, being Deep Purple one of the pioneers of the latter style.

Steve Morse creates lots of beautiful instrumental moments sliding on his electric guitar strings, sometimes delicately sometimes more roughly and powerfully.

Singer Ian Gillan takes out the harmonica for “Lazy”, saying that usually it would be at this time that Claude Nobs would come out and play with them. He plays an outstanding solo on the harmonica.

Despite their age Deep Purple are still energetic on stage, each member is giving himself fully to his instrument and the singer to his voice, doing pretty amazing vocals! The public joins in singing out loud the refrain “na na na na na na” of the song “Hush”.

For the iconic “Smoke on the Water”, which Deep Purple wrote on the aftermath of the fire at the Montreux Casino in 1971, the screen shows images of the casino, newspaper’s articles, the lyrics of the song on a note, the fire and smoke by the lake. A 360 degrees experience, except for those who were “enjoying” the song through the screen of their mobile phone.

After this the band leaves the stage as the screen shows the name “deep purple”.

After the encore, towards the end of the gig it’s the right time to have some fun jamming around, Don Airey on keyboards plays something, which is reproduced on the electric guitar by Steve Morse. An interesting and fun musical discourse!

At the end of the gig singer Ian Gillan bids goodbye with a “We love you. Bye now!”.

A great concert by a band that marked the history of hard rock and which is very dear to Montreux Jazz.

Simona @TakeMe2aConcert