Chaka Khan And Festival Organizers On Bringing Montreux Jazz To Miami

Fifty years into her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame career, Chaka Khan has one of the great legacies in music. However, she refuses to live in that storied past.

“I’m a next girl, about what comes next, not what I did yesterday or last year, really about what I’m going to do tomorrow,” Khan tells me.

What she is doing next is headlining night two – next Saturday, March 1 – of the Jon Batiste-curated Montreux Jazz Festival Miami. A U.S. version of the legendary Swiss music event, this is year two. I spoke with Khan, as well as the festival’s Adam Fell and Thomas DuPort about the event, Quincy Jones’ legacy in shaping the weekend and more.

Steve Baltin: How much is your idyllic living situation fueling your new music with Sia?

Chaka Khan: It may have had something to do with it. I’m not sure about that, but it’s possible. However, I just think that the change of pace has meant more to me with working with Sia than anything. I don’t like being placed in my box. I hate that because I do everything. There’s nothing I can’t do, and that’s what I’m about. Now I’ve got chickens, and do you want me to get some horses? I’ve got a lot of land; I’ve got everything I need. It’s just beautiful to wake up every day and pretty much know what’s going to happen to you.

Baltin: At Montreux Jazz Festival in Miami, you’re there with Jon Batiste and Janelle Monae. Have you worked with Jon and Janelle before?

Khan: The thing I love about a jazz festival for us as musicians is we get to see people that we’ve never seen live before, and the choice of music is great. You’re not boxed in or listening to one kind of music all day long. You get to hear great music and great musicians have been who love music, they love what they do, and they do it well, they just do a great job.

Baltin: How do you approach putting together a setlist for a festival?

Khan: I have to do setlists. I’m constantly changing all the time what songs I’m singing because I want to be happy singing them like the people that are happy listening. I want to be as happy singing the stuff as they are listening. So, in order to stay on that fine line, you have to constantly change things around, It’s just the nature of musicianship, I guess, but it’s also a good thing to do. It’s just good for you to stay refreshed and challenge yourself. Stay challenged. There are several songs in my set that I’ve been singing forever, and I’m tired of singing them. But the people still want to hear them. So, I have to find a good way of doing that. And the best way of doing that is through a medley, give me a short story quickly with all those songs. I put them all in it and that way it’s not as painful for me. I understand. I need to have stuff first that moves me and makes me happy and hasn’t become mature.

Baltin: So, do you have new stuff that you’re bringing in?

Khan: Yeah, and if I don’t find those there’s plenty of old stuff. I was thinking about putting a Tina Turner song in my set and honoring her a little bit. She’s been a very unknown superwoman in this industry, she got it done with insurmountable circumstances around her. I was listening to “Private Dancer” in the car the other day and I heard it come on and I said, “Well, I want to sing that song.” I’m going to find a way to sing it, maybe one or two of her songs and honor her. I want to keep it interesting. That’s what I need to do. For me, that’s the most important thing of all.

Baltin: What makes a successful show for you?

Khan: This industry has turned it into like a contest, who’s better than who. There’s no such thing in art, because you make it for the individual. It’s a beautiful thing. It may not be what you like, but if it’s done well and you see that they are touched and moving in the right direction, honestly, it’s such a beautiful thing. For me, that’s how it is.

Baltin: There’s no greater validation and challenge than to work with people like Miles and Prince. I know Joni is a big fan. Those are the best artists of all time who are endorsing you.

Khan: That’s beautiful. I’m honored. And what else could I say? I’m just so honored that I’m so highly thought of by great people. I love that. Beautiful.

Baltin: Tell me about the record you’re doing with Sia.

Khan: I’ve been doing pop music for years. This is just something I’m very happy to be doing because it’s refreshing. She’s a great writer, and it’s an honor for me to sing herself. She seems to know me inside out. It’s just crazy, and I love it.

Baltin: What makes Montreux special as a festival?

Khan: At Montreux they care a great deal about the music. And that’s important. I know that they have great music fans there, and I know that it’ll get a great response. You get a great array of different people and different types of music coming on one stage usually at one time and as long as they take that with them, I’m really interested to see what their musical criteria is going to be for the future. If they can make that happen in America that’d be great.

Baltin: How did you choose Miami?

Adam Fell: It was brought on by our other partner who’s a Miami native, Jeremy. I think we all had this vision of doing for music what Basel has done for art and doing something really special in Miami. And as you know, during the pandemic, there’s a huge influx of population into Miami. It’s a place that is a destination similar to Montreux, Switzerland, where you don’t have to do much kind of arm bending to get the artists to go there. It’s got the texture of a place you’d go for vacation. And therefore, we felt it was a really good choice for doing Montreux, since that’s really the DNA of what Montreux is a festival that really takes care of the artists in a way that makes them want to come back. People do love it and people have always felt that there’s a music vacuum there. And to your point, when you have the Detroit Jazz Festival in Detroit, or you have Jazz Fest in New Orleans, you have these incredible big cultural festivals that are staples of what those communities are. Miami doesn’t have that. And we felt that it was really important for us to choose a location that had a lot of these qualities. We were really excited about bringing something like this to Miami.

Baltin: Miami also obviously does have its own reach in terms of Latin music. So how much is that incorporated into it?

Fell: Absolutely. And as I understand it, more than 60 percent of the population has Spanish as the first language. We have done both overt and subtle nods to Latin culture. This year, you’re going to see the third day of the festival, basically be an enormous Latin jam. If you haven’t seen the lineup for that day, it’s pretty darn special. We have Paquito D’Rivera, Yissy Garcia, we have Alfredo Rodriguez, we have Monsieur Perine, we have a ton of incredible Latin artists who are going to be performing on that day. It’s co-hosted by Cimafunk, who is obviously a Latin Grammy nominee for Album of the Year this year. He and Jon are doing that together. Last year, you probably saw, we had Emily Estefan, and we had a bunch of Latin performers that came as part of the jam. We had Gonzalo Rubalcaba show up as a surprise. It was actually my favorite moment of the entire festival last year, was Gonzalo jumping on the piano and surprising everyone with everyone chanting. You had four of the best pianists in the world sitting around the piano chanting on Gonzalo as he was leading the jam. You had Jon Batiste, you had Elew, I remember you had Adrian Coda, Corey Henry, all these guys who are like just masters in their own right, sitting around the piano cheering on Gonzalo as he was performing and it was a pretty special moment last year.

Baltin: Like you started off by saying it’s a franchise of an incredibly accomplished thing. So, Montreux obviously has this huge history and legacy and name, but Miami is also a completely different place in terms of vibes. Talk about how you merge the Montreux legacy with Miami.

Fell: I’ll tell you a little bit of a story about how it came about because I think that will elucidate some of the answers to the question you just asked and then I’ll get straight at that. Tomas and I worked for Quincy Jones myself for 20 years. Tomas for more than a decade. We met because Quincy brought me to the Montreux Jazz Festival. Tomas was working for the Jazz Festival and we became fast friends. He moved to Los Angeles, started working with us and started managing artists for us. I think Montreux is something that is very unique in the world of music festivals. If you’ve been, it is a place where, and I’ve already touched on this, but so many of the artists that go want to go back. It’s like this coveted space in music where the musicians aren’t quite doing it for all the same reasons that they’re doing it at so many other festivals. You catch them at four in the morning, still at the Montreux Jam performing. And you’re wondering, “Wait, their contract only said that they had to appear for an hour and a half from 9 .30 to 11 p.m. on the Stravinsky stage, but yet they’re here at the Jam, and it’s four in the morning, and they’ve been here for three hours, and they’ve been on the mic four times.” That doesn’t really exist anywhere else. I’ve seen it again and again and again, and it was the same reason that Quincy, our former boss, wanted to go every single year. Our management company that was created by Quincy was the result of him seeing a Cuban pianist performing in Montreux, Alfredo Rodriguez. I remember Quincy saying to me when he got back from the trip, “This is one of the best pianists I’ve ever seen in my life. I want to work with him.” That was 2006. In 2009, we would sign Alfredo to Quincy’s company as a management client. That was the very beginning of us signing young artists to Quincy’s production company as management clients. At that time, it was Quincy’s dream to take young jazz musicians and bring them to the forefront of popular culture. If you look back at that period of time, that was the first client we’d signed, but then we signed Jacob Collier, we signed Jon Batiste. I think the thing that Quincy really wanted to happen is in the process of happening. That’s something that’s really exciting for me. And so now back to your question about why Miami and what about our festival is in tune with what is authentic to Miami. Obviously, we realize that if we want to have the type of sales and the type of appeal the type of demand for our festival that we need it to have for it to survive we have to appeal to a broad audience. We can’t just do exactly what they do in Switzerland. So, you’re seeing, both last year and this year, a very overt nod to Latin culture. But before I say that that differentiates us from Switzerland, I have to point out that Quincy and Claude [Nobs] were doing that for years and years. You look at the Brazilian night that they did almost every year. You look at the Brazilian boat crews that they did for years and years on the festival and they had this huge Brazilian party that went all day every day. I think Quincy felt that the African diaspora that touched the music’s of Cuba, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and on and on and the creation of salsa, samba, and so many of these music’s was a result of the of the diaspora and this was really important to him. So, you saw that on the Swiss version of the festival for a long time. So it wasn’t that much of a stretch for us to start incorporating that in an authentic way into the Miami festival.

Thomas Duport: The festival is located on the ground where there is a restaurant next to us, the Bayshore Club, which is a very famous restaurant. So, we’ll have offerings from them. We also work with Sereia, who’s head chef is a two-time Michelin star chef, and they’ll bring some of the Portuguese specialty that they do there. We have premium sushi that’s in the Miami district that’s coming up that was with us last year, and that was probably the highlight of the festival in terms of the food options. We also have Celia’s, who’s a new burger place in Miami that’s just opened in Wynwood, and it’s really using natural and good products. They’re coming with us and partnering with us for this year of the festival.

Baltin: What do you hope is the takeaway from the weekend?

Fell: We really care deeply about doing this right. And what is doing this right doing this right is artists coming away from it saying the same thing that they say when they come away from Switzerland, which is, “I want to go back. They really took care of me. They really cared about the things that were important to me and I had a blast. I was there until three in the morning on the mic not because I was trying to have a viral moment on social media, but because I was playing incredible music with incredible people.” I noticed last year, and I’m just going to point this out, there was a point during the jam where there were probably only 50 people in the room. Twenty-five of those were on stage, and it was going off. I was thinking to myself, “As this festival grows, I really hope that people catch on to the fact that the jam is so incredible.”