Born on June 12, 1975 in Vevey, a music lover and graduate of the École Hôtelière de Lausanne, Mathieu Jaton is today at the head of the Montreux Jazz Festival, an event that welcomes 250,000 spectators and more than 380 concerts during two weeks each summer in Montreux, Switzerland.

 Mathieu Jaton spent his childhood in Attalens (canton of Fribourg), a village in which he began his career in the organisation of events by setting up various events and music festivals with friends. During his studies, he juggled the management of a bar-club with his activities as a guitarist and singer in a jazz-rock band. In 1999, at the age of 24, he joined the permanent office of the Montreux Jazz Festival as Marketing and Sponsorship Manager. He was appointed General Secretary of the event in 2001. Alongside Claude Nobs, who had become his mentor, he developed the values he had always held dear: a taste for hospitality and music, above all else.

 After Claude Nobs’ death in 2013, he took over the management of the Montreux Jazz Festival Foundation (FFJM), the Montreux Jazz Artists Foundation (MJAF) and Montreux Jazz International SA (MJI). In 2019, he founded the Montreux Media Ventures (MMV) company, a subsidiary of the Festival in charge of content production and distribution. In 2022, he became vice-president of the FFJM and MJAF foundation boards. He is also a member of the Foundation Boards of the EJMA (Lausanne), the Mühle Hunzinken (Rubigen) and the Beyond Foundation (Erlenbach), as well as a member of the Association Label Suisse. 

Faced with the profound changes in the live music market, Mathieu Jaton has been able to diversify the Festival’s activities and implement a business structure that is both sustainable and agile, with solid foundations that encourage risk-taking, creativity and innovation. Surrounded by some thirty employees throughout the year and more than 2,000 staff during the Festival period, he favours authentic, direct relationships and guides the Festival towards its future orientations in the continuity of the know-how and values that make Montreux so unique in the music world.