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The Montreux Jazz Café in the arrival hall of Geneva’s international airport seems like a pretty cool idea. Open a chic café designed to highlight the Montreux JazzFestival, and while customers sip that extravagantly priced cappuccino, waiting for the arrival of the routinely delayed Air France flight from Paris, they can watch a video of the jazz performance that they missed while stalled on the Montreux exit of the autoroute last year. The question of quality, as William Dowell, one of our Essential Edge editors discovered to his acoustic dismay, is is a much different matter.

I’d been steered to the café a few weeks ago when a business acquaintance chose it as the best place to make a ten-minute pitch. It looked clean, a bit stylish, and most important, relaxed. It had the normal assortment of over-priced hors d’oeuvres, but that was OK. It was what Hemingway used to call a clean, well-lighted place. The café had just opened, and back then there was no music.

When my wife and I drove to the airport to pick up our son last Saturday, only to find out that his Air France flight was going to be an hour late after a grueling transatlantic flight, I naturally steered her to the café to calm her nerves. The arrival hall was packed. Everyone and their aunt seemed to be coming home for the holidays, dragging an assortment of wheeled baggage, skis and backpacks behind them. You could barely move. Not the Montreux Jazz Café, though. It seemed to be the only place in the airport that was nearly deserted. That should have been a warning.

I glanced at one of the four giant flat screen monitors dominating the room, and there was Elvis Costello, speaking into a microphone in a barely audible voice what seemed like an extremely serious monologue about the philosophy underlying the performance that we were about to see. I missed the explanation, but I’d heard Costello on the radio every now and then, and he seemed a bit odd, but mildly interesting. How could I know that he was about to commit an innovative form of musical suicide?

The camera flashed briefly on three violins playing a few bars of what sounded like a classical symphony, and then switched to a close up of Elvis’ mouth. The sound that came out was hard to describe, but it reminded me of that nerve shattering sensation you get when you drag your finger nail across a slate blackboard. It was so grating that you couldn’t really get the meaning of  the words. The effect was exaggerated by the fact that it was coming at us at what seemed like a couple of hundred decibels. It was hard to ignore. Mercifully, it didn’t break any windows, but I thought it might curdle the milk in my coffee. My wife, already nervous about our son’s delayed flight, grabbed the edges of the table. “That is the worst thing I have ever heard in my life,” she said.

I approached a blonde waitress, sporting a trendy black T-shirt with a large “M” (for Montreux) stitched in giant silver sequins on the back, and suggested she might turn down the volume. She stared at me blankly. I guessed that she probably couldn’t hear what I was saying. The part of her cerebral cortex that interprets the meaning of sounds had undoubtedly shut down. I surveyed the empty café, and it all began to become clear. Even great ideas go off track if there is no one to fine tune the results, and at the Montreux Jazz Café there was no management in sight. Instead, the waiters navigated through the noise like animated zombies.  “Don’t get excited,” my wife said, actually meaning, let’s not become violent. I decided to treat it like a zen exercise. At the same time, I began to have a new understanding of what the inmates at Guantanamo must be feeling when subjected to “stress interrogations” involving blasting them with  banal ersatz pop music at maximum distortion.

Costello’s performance came to an end. He glanced at the camera with an air of ultimate self-satisfaction. In the brief interlude, I asked a waitress for another cappuccino, and possibly a Tylenol. She nodded and headed off. Ten minutes later I saw her, wearing a gray fleece and scurrying out of the hall. Either she hadn’t heard what I’d said, or had been too enervated by the noise to take it in. On the flat screen, Elvis was at it again. This time, the set was labeled a “distorded” performance. Right, I thought, but why are you doing this? Doesn’t anyone listen to this stuff before inflicting it on the public? ” On the screen, small, crisp white letters announced that the production was the work of “Playbox” Yes, I thought, we’re in the hands of some labor-saving intercultural robotic machine, no human supervision. The waiters don’t hear it, because that is not in their job description, and no one is in charge.

Just as I was mulling over what to do next, a waiter lowered the volume incrementally. “The flight landed,”my wife said. I took one last look at the screen. Credits were rolling past shots of an audience delivering polite, luke-warm applause. I marveled that anyone would want their name attached to that. The camera zoomed back in on Costello. “You killed two birds with one stone,” I thought quietly to myself, “The café and the Montreux festival.” Pity, I thought, because it actually was a pretty cool idea.