Jazz Cocktail

Every page on jazzcocktail.ch carries the same header line: "Le groupe de musiciens Jazz pour vos mariages, réceptions, cocktails, comités d'entreprises en Suisse, Genève, Lausanne, Zurich." Four places, and one of them does not belong with the others. Geneva, Lausanne and Montreux sit within an hour of each other on Lake Geneva. Zurich is a different linguistic region, hours away by road. So does the band actually play there, or is Zurich riding along in a keyword list built for search engines rather than for couples?

The site answers that question itself, on a page most visitors never click through to: "Prestations Diverses," a plain list of past bookings with no marketing copy attached. It names a wedding at the Château de Coppet in Vaud, a corporate reception for Sotheby's Genève, a gala at the Montreux Palace, evenings for KPMG and Crédit Suisse, a reception for MCI Genève with John Kerry among the guests, a wedding at the Hôtel Beaurivage Palace in Lausanne, and one booking that runs past the Swiss border entirely, a quartet at the Hôtel Royal in Evian, on the French shore of the same lake. Every entry on that page sits in Geneva, Vaud, Valais or just across into France. Not one names Zurich, Basel or anywhere in German-speaking Switzerland.

That pattern holds everywhere else on the site too. The dedicated Jazz New Orleans page narrows its own service area to "Genève, Lausanne et Montreux" and "Suisse Romande." The singer page repeats exactly that same trio of cities. The photos and video page closes by naming, again, only "Genève, Lausanne et Montreux." Even the newest page on the whole site, a Geneva-focused landing page published in April 2026 with its own price list and its own client roster, never mentions Zurich, despite being the most detailed and most current thing the band has published about itself. Four separate service pages, a portfolio page and the newest content on the site all agree with each other and disagree with the header. Zurich reads as a word sitting in a tagline, not a market this band has ever documented playing.

Once you look past that header, Jazz Cocktail turns out to be a small, flexible combo built around two musicians who show up for every booking: a guitarist and a saxophonist. From there, the band's own "Duo, Trio, Quartet" page spells out exactly how it scales. The duo, guitar and saxophone, is pitched at intimate receptions of 10 to 50 guests, played acoustically or barely amplified. The trio adds a double bass, and the band calls this its own "formule de prédilection," its preferred, default setup, recommended for 50 to 120 guests. The quartet brings in a drummer and is recommended from 120 guests up, mainly so the group keeps enough visual and sonic presence not to disappear into a crowd that size. A separate page aimed specifically at Geneva weddings gives a slightly different bracket for the duo, 30 to 100 guests rather than 10 to 50, which does not quite square with the dedicated formula page; both figures are what the site itself publishes, so both are worth knowing rather than one being quietly picked over the other.

Alongside that standard lineup, the band also offers a New Orleans, or Dixieland, format built around a banjo instead of a guitar: a duo of banjo and saxophone, growing through a trio that adds trumpet and a quartet that adds a washboard player for rhythm, up to a full five-piece with double bass. It is pitched as a mobile, roaming format, since the musicians can walk among guests rather than staying planted in one spot, and the site is explicit that this is a livelier, more old-fashioned sound than its default lounge-jazz register, not a like-for-like substitute for it.

The core repertoire is what the band calls Jazz standards, mostly Broadway and American songbook material from the 1920s through the 1950s, played acoustically or lightly amplified so it sits behind conversation rather than over it. Alongside that sits a Bossa Nova set (Corcovado, Desafinado and The Girl from Ipanema are among the titles listed) and a run of French chansons, including Gainsbourg's La Javanaise. The band also arranges pop and film songs in a jazz idiom: Stevie Wonder and Leonard Cohen sit on the same published list as Jason Mraz, and the repertoire page invites couples to ask for a favourite that is not on it. Add the singer, who can also join the full quartet for a five-piece configuration, and the printed set list stretches further still, into "You've Got a Friend in Me" from Toy Story and "Flightless Bird," the song played over the wedding scene in Twilight.

Ceremony music is billed as a separate offering from the reception repertoire, and it is one thing that sets this act apart from a straightforward function band: several of its musicians trained classically before playing jazz, so the ceremony page can offer Schubert's and Gounod's Ave Maria, Fauré's Pavane and Pachelbel's Canon alongside secular songs like Etta James's "At Last" and Peter Gabriel's "The Book of Love," usually played by just guitar and saxophone, "pour préserver un côté intime" (to keep things intimate), in the ceremony page's own words. On request, the band says it can also bring in a classically trained singer for the ceremony itself.

Its own PA, kept deliberately quiet

Across several different pages, the same operational detail keeps showing up: an acoustic or lightly amplified setup, with no separate sound engineer or full PA rig needed for a gathering of ordinary size. The band brings its own equipment, tuned to the room rather than set at a fixed volume, and both of its corporate-event pages add that a microphone is available on request for a toast or a speech. The threshold where that changes is stated plainly on the repertoire page: for a gathering above 150 guests, the band can bring heavier reinforcement, but it treats that as the exception rather than the default. The same framing runs through every format on the site: even the New Orleans lineup, built around a banjo and a washboard rather than amplifiers, is described as playing with no sound reinforcement at all.

A price list that only covers Geneva

Jazz Cocktail is unusually specific about money for a wedding supplier, though only for one part of its territory. Its Geneva-sector landing page prints a flat rate by format: a duo costs 1000 CHF, a trio 1400 CHF and a quartet 2000 CHF, sound included, alongside a general estimate of 450 to 500 CHF per musician for a two-hour cocktail-hour set. A companion page pricing corporate evenings in both Geneva and Lausanne gives about 500 CHF per musician for a two to three-hour booking. Neither page states what happens outside "Secteur Genève," and no Zurich-specific rate is published anywhere, one more gap in a claim the site never otherwise backs up.

Musicians are typically booked for a two-hour block somewhere between 17:00 and 21:00 to cover the cocktail hour, and can be asked to stay on through dinner, up to about 23:00. The band's own advice article is candid that it is not meant to carry the night from there: past that point, it says plainly, "les musiciens ne pourront rivaliser avec un DJ" (the musicians will not be able to compete with a DJ) switching between chart hits and decades of dance music, and it recommends handing the floor over rather than stretching a jazz set into a late dance set. That same article, a general guide to hiring wedding musicians in Switzerland rather than a quote of this band's own rate, puts the wider market at 350 to 1000 CHF per musician depending on experience and set length, useful context for comparing quotes even though it is not Jazz Cocktail's own figure. Booking runs through a contract and a deposit to hold the date, though the site does not publish a deposit amount.

The only English anywhere on jazzcocktail.ch is that same tagline pattern's own English half: a single translated sentence, repeated almost word for word on the homepage, the New Orleans page and the Geneva wedding page ("Hire a jazz band in Switzerland for your wedding, reception and private party..."). There is no English contact form and nothing stating whether a quote, a contract or the day itself would be handled in English. That is not evidence the band cannot work with an English-speaking couple, plenty of Geneva-based suppliers manage fine without a bilingual site, but it is not evidence that it can either, and a couple planning from abroad should ask directly rather than assume.

What jazzcocktail.ch actually documents, in its own list of past bookings rather than its own marketing copy, is a well-established Lake Geneva act: Rolex, Montblanc, KPMG and Crédit Suisse all turn up more than once as repeat corporate clients, and the wedding venues named run from lakeside estates to grand hotels in Lausanne and Montreux. A couple marrying anywhere from Geneva to Vevey to the Vaud countryside is looking at a band with a genuine, specific track record to check for themselves. A couple marrying in Zurich is looking at four words in a header tag, and would do well to ask the band directly, before booking, whether it has ever actually made that trip.