Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water is essentially a police blotter set to a riff: a report of the Montreux Casino burning down during a Frank Zappa concert in December 1971 after someone fired a flare gun into the ceiling. That fire becomes the metaphor for this episode's story of how a three-day local event in 1967 grew into the second largest jazz festival on the planet, behind only Montreal. Spearheaded by Claude Nobs, Géo Voumard and René Langel with the backing of a tourism office led by Raymond Jaussi, the festival secured an anchor tenant in Atlantic Records' Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun and opened with Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald, offering American jazz artists the reverence and pin-drop silence they rarely received at home.

The hosts explain how Nobs cross-subsidized pure jazz with stadium rock ...