Christian Broecking

This Uncontainable Feeling of Freedom

Irène Schweizer — European Jazz,
and the Politics of Improvisation

The Authorized Biography

Translated from the German by Jeb Bishop

Verein Freundinnen und Freunde von Irène Schweizer
Hochschule Luzern – Musik
Broecking Verlag

IMPRESSUM

© Verein Freundinnen und Freunde von Irène Schweizer, Zürich

© Texts: authors

© Photographs and posters: see photo credits

Authors: Christian Broecking, Olivier Senn, and Toni Bechtold

Translation: Jeb Bishop

Organization of the English Translation:
Verein Freundinnen und Freunde von Irène Schweizer, Anja Illmaier

Image selection: Christian Broecking

Cover design: Niklaus Troxler

Typesetting: Christian Walter

Index of persons: Toni Bechtold

Editing: Natalie Kirschstein, Christian Broecking, Marianne Regard, and Maxi Sickert

Proofreading: Natalie Kirschstein

ISBN Ebook: 978-3-75411-064-5
ISBN Print: 978-3-75411-017-1

Publisher:

Verein Freundinnen und Freunde von Irène Schweizer,
Hochschule Luzern – Musik,
and Broecking Verlag

Verein Freundinnen und Freunde von Irène Schweizer, Zurich

Broecking Verlag, Berlin

Hochschule Lucerne / Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts

Inhaltsverzeichnis

IMPORTANT PERSONS

THIS UNCONTAINABLE FEELING OF FREEDOM

Coda

JUNGLE BEATS

Jungle Beats II

IRÈNE SCHWEIZER DISCOGRAPHY

IRÈNE SCHWEIZER CHRONOLOGY

PHOTOGRAPHS

PLAYING TECHNIQUE

PERSONS INTERVIEWED

Credits and Acknowledgements

About the Author

IMPORTANT PERSONS

Conny Bauer: Trombonist, born 1943. Repeated appearances with Schweizer in the 1980s. Recordings with Schweizer and the London Jazz Composers Orchestra: Theoria (1991) and Radio Rondo (2008). Lives in Berlin.

Han Bennink: Percussionist, born 1942. Has worked with Schweizer since the recording of European Echoes in 1969. Countless appearances together in various ensembles. Duo CDs: Irène Schweizer – Han Bennink (1995) and Welcome Back (2015). Lives in Amsterdam.

Anthony Braxton: Saxophonist, music theorist, born 1945. Lives in Middletown (Connecticut).

Peter Brötzmann: Saxophonist, born 1941. Has known Schweizer since 1965. Occasional concerts together in the early years. Recorded on European Echoes in 1969. In 1984, Schweizer played in his ensemble at the Sound Unity Festival in New York. Lives in Wuppertal.

Peter Bürli: Journalist, head of the jazz department of the Swiss Radio DRS/SRF. Born 1957. Has done articles and programs on Schweizer since 1985; organized numerous studio recordings and concert recordings with Schweizer, some of which appear on Intakt CDs. Lives in Zürich.

Rüdiger Carl: Saxophonist, clarinetist, accordionist, born 1944. Met Schweizer in 1972 as part of the FMP scene, and then played in many ensembles with her. Various recordings together for FMP, and, after 1988, with COWWS. Lives in Frankfurt.

John Corbett: Cultural organizer, concert promoter, gallerist, born 1963. Presented Schweizer in Chicago; her solo concert there in 2000 was released on CD. Re-released the out-of-print live recording of the Tchicai-Schweizer Group at the 1975 Willisau Jazz Festival, “Willi the Pig,” on CD. Lives in Chicago.

Sylvie Courvoisier: Pianist, born 1968. Met Schweizer in the early 1980s. Lives in New York.

Monique Crelier: Born 1994; has been Schweizer’s partner since 2009. Formerly ran a hairdresser’s salon. Lives in Basel.

Marilyn Crispell: Pianist, born 1947. Duo CD with Irène Schweizer: Overlapping Hands: Eight Segments (FMP 1990). Lives in Woodstock.

Andrew Cyrille: Percussionist, born 1939. Various concerts with Schweizer; CD releases: Irène Schweizer – Andrew Cyrille (recorded live at Willisau Jazz Festival 1988) and Berne Concert with Trio 3 + Irène Schweizer (2007). Lives in New York.

Jacques Demière: Pianist, born 1954. Worked with Schweizer as composer and pianist in the mid-1980s. Lives in Geneva.

Hamid Drake: Percussionist, born 1955. Numerous appearances with Schweizer in Europe and Chicago. Their recordings from taktlos 1998 and Willisau 2007 appear on the Intakt CD Irène Schweizer – Fred Anderson – Hamid Drake. Lives in Chicago and Milan.

Pierre Favre: Percussionist, born 1937. First recording with Schweizer as Pierre Favre Trio: Santana (1968). Has since been a close musical partner and confidant of Schweizer. Was present along with Schweizer in 1969 at the recording of European Echoes by Manfred Schoof. Countless concerts and three duo CDs with Schweizer. Worked at Paiste from 1967 to 1972, Schweizer worked there as his secretary. Lives in Uster.

Peter K. Frey: Bassist, born 1941. In 1971, played in the Irène Schweizer Quartet with Makaya Ntshoko and Jürg Grau. Lived in the cultural-politically engaged musicians’ living community WG am Wasser with, among others, Schweizer and the pianist Urs Voerkel, from 1974 to 1977. In their Huus Trio, Schweizer played drums. Founded the Workshop for Improvised Music (WIM) and Swiss Musicians’ Cooperative (MKS). Lives in Zürich.

Jost Gebers: Bassist, social worker, born 1940. Founder of Free Music Production (FMP), directed FMP, organized the Total Music Meeting, Free Music Workshop, and other concert series in Berlin from 1968 to 2000. Produced and released numerous recordings with Schweizer, including Wilde Señoritas (1976) and Hexensabbat (1977). Lives in Borken.

Barry Guy: Bassist, born 1947. Leads the London Jazz Composers Orchestra. Various appearances and recordings with Schweizer, including Theoria (1991) and Radio Rondo (2008). Lives near Zürich.

Rosina Kuhn: Painter, born 1940, a friend of Schweizer’s since 1977. Performances together until 1983. Designed the CD covers for Les Diaboliques. Lives in Zürich.

Oliver Lake: Saxophonist, born 1942. Concerts with Schweizer, Reggie Workman, and Andrew Cyrille in 2007 in Bern and Zürich; a concert recording was released on Intakt as Berne Concert with Trio 3 + Irène Schweizer. Lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

Patrik Landolt: Cultural organizer, journalist, CD producer, concert organizer, editor for many years of the left-wing weekly paper WoZ. Born 1956. Has known Schweizer since 1976. Beginning in 1982, he founded, with Schweizer, various autonomous musicians’ and cultural initiatives, including Fabrikjazz, taktlos, unerhört! and, finally, Intakt. Close friend, confidant, and supporter of Schweizer. Lives in Zürich.

Joëlle Léandre: Bassist, born 1951. Has known Schweizer since 1978. Countless appearances together, including the trio Les Diaboliques with Maggie Nicols since 1991. Various recordings and releases together on Nato, FMP, and Intakt. Lives in Paris.

George E. Lewis: Trombonist, composer, professor of composition at Columbia University in New York. Born 1952. Many concerts with Schweizer in a wide variety of ensembles. Recordings together: Les Douze Sons (Joëlle Léandre, 1983), Live at taktlos (1984), and The Storming of the Winter Palace (1986). Lives in New York.

Paul Lovens: Percussionist, born 1949. Has known Schweizer since 1975, from the WG am Wasser. Played with Schweizer at the first taktlos festival in 1984; the recording appeared as the first Intakt LP, Live at taktlos. Lives in Nickelsdorf, Austria.

La Lupa: Folksinger, born 1947. Has known Schweizer since 1985, is her friend, and developed a concert program together with her. Lives in Zürich.

Rosmarie A.Meier: Sociologist, concert organizer, born 1955. Directs the Alterszentrum Pfrundhaus-Bürgerasyl elder living facility in Zürich. Has known Schweizer since 1979 as a close friend and confidante. Organized the first Swiss Women’s Jazz Festival Canaille in 1986. Has organized concerts and tours for Schweizer, and founded the Intakt label with Patrik Landolt. Lives in Zürich.

Tommy Meier: Saxophonist, born 1959. CDs with Schweizer and his band Root Down: Root Down (2007), and The Master and the Rain (2010). Lives in Jonen.

Louis Moholo: Percussionist, born 1940. Has known Schweizer since 1964; countless concerts together in a wide variety of ensembles. Recordings and releases in trio with Schweizer and Rüdiger Carl from 1975 to 1978: Messer and Tuned Boots; duo CD Irène Schweizer – Louis Moholo (Intakt, 1986). 2003 tour of South Africa with Schweizer. Lives in Cape Town.

Mani Neumeier: Percussionist, born 1940. Has known Schweizer since 1963; played in the Schweizer Trio from 1964 to 1967. Recordings together: Early Tapes (1967) and Jazz Meets India (1967). Lives near Heidelberg.

Maggie Nicols: Singer, born 1948. Has played with Schweizer in a wide variety of ensembles since 1978, first in the Feminist Improvising Group FIG, later also in the taktlos group, and since 1991 in the trio Les Diaboliques with Léandre. Various recordings and releases together. Lives in Carms, Wales.

Lucas Niggli: Percussionist, born 1968. Works as board member with Schweizer in the Intakt Records Association. Lives in Uster.

Makaya Ntshoko: Percussionist, born 1939. Has known Schweizer since 1962, countless concerts in many different groups. Recordings and releases together: Willi the Pig: Live at the Willisau Jazz Festival (1975, with John Tchicai and Buschi Niebergall) and Can Walk on Sand (Where’s Africa Trio with Omri Ziegele, 2009). Lives in Basel.

Evan Parker: Saxophonist, born 1942. Worked with Schweizer sporadically over many years, beginning in 1969 in the Pierre Favre Quartet. Recordings with Schweizer and the London Jazz Composers Orchestra: Theoria (1991) and Radio Rondo (2008). Lives in Faversham, England.

William Parker: Bassist, directs the New York Vision Festival. Born 1952. With Peter Kowald, organized the Sound Vision Festival in New York in 1984, at which Schweizer appeared. Occasional appearances together since then in New York and Zürich. Lives in New York.

Barre Phillips: Bassist, born 1934. Occasional concerts with Schweizer in various groups since 1970; recordings with her and the London Jazz Composers Orchestra: Theoria (1991) and Radio Rondo (2008). Lives in France.

Marianne Regard: Neuropsychologist, born 1946. Has known Schweizer since the late 1960s; they have been friends since 1975. Since then she has become one of Schweizer’s closest friends, and has accompanied her on many concert tours. Lives in Zürich.

Urs Röllin: Guitarist, founder and director of the Schaffhausen Jazz Festival, born 1959. Organized many of Schweizer’s concerts, and has presented her work since 1990 at the festival in many different ensembles. Also a member of the festival’s advisory board. Lives in Schaffhausen.

Isolde Schaad: Writer, publicist, works for the left-wing weekly paper WoZ, born 1944. In 1967, she wrote her first article about Schweizer, and in 1990 she gave the honorary address when Schweizer was awarded the Georg Fischer prize. Originally from Schaffhausen. Lives in Zürich.

Margrit Schlatter: Younger sister of Irène Schweizer, pharmacist, born 1942. Married with a son. Lives in Schaffhausen.

Alexander von Schlippenbach: Pianist, born 1938. With Schweizer, was part of the recording of European Echoes by Manfred Schoof. Lives in Berlin.

Manfred Schoof: Trumpeter, born 1936. Appeared with Schweizer in 1967 at the Donaueschingen Music Days and the Berlin Jazz Days, in the project “Jazz Meets India.” Schweizer also took part in the recording of his European Echoes in June 1969 in Bremen. This influential LP was the beginning of the FMP label. Lives near Cologne.

Günter Baby Sommer: Percussionist, born 1943. Numerous appearances and tours with Schweizer since 1984. Recordings together: Live at taktlos (1984), The Storming of the Winter Palace (1986), and Irène Schweizer – Günter Sommer (1987). Lives in Radebeul.

Bruno Spoerri: Saxophonist, born 1935. Has known Schweizer since her first appearance at the National Amateur Jazz Festival Zürich in 1958. They performed together with his band Jazz Rock Experience in 1970. Lives in Zürich.

Co Streiff: Saxophonist, born 1959. Met Schweizer at the 1986 Canaille Festival; since then has played with her in various groups. Duo CD: Twin Lines (Intakt, 2001). Lives in Jonen.

Fredy Studer: Percussionist, born 1948. Played with Schweizer in the Jazz Rock Experience. In 1972, he took over Pierre Favre’s position at Paiste, where Schweizer worked as a secretary until 1974. Lives in Lucerne.

Niklaus Troxler: Graphic artist, founded the Willisau Jazz Festival in 1975, born 1947. Organized numerous concerts for Schweizer, and presented her work continuously and comprehensively in a wide variety of ensembles between 1968 and 1992. Presented Schweizer’s first solo concert, in Willisau in 1976. Lives in Willisau and Berlin.

Nikola Weisse: Actress with the Marthaler company in Basel, born 1941. Has known Schweizer since 1985; has been her friend and neighbor since 2004. Lives in Zürich.

Jürg Wickihalder: Saxophonist, born 1973 in Glarus. Recorded the Intakt CDs Jump, by the Jürg Wickihalder European Quartet feat. Irène Schweizer, and Spring, by the Irène Schweizer – Jürg Wickihalder Duo. Lives in Zürich.

Reggie Workman: Bassist, born 1937. Concerts with Schweizer, Lake, and Cyrille in 2007, in Bern and Zürich, were released on Intakt as Berne Concert with Trio 3 + Irène Schweizer. Lives in New York.

Omri Ziegele: Saxophonist, born 1959. Numerous duo concerts with Schweizer since 1997; founded and worked with her in the musicians’ initiative OHR. With Schweizer, recorded the CDs Where’s Africa (2005) and Can Walk on Sand (2009). Lives in Zürich.

A note on references

All publications are cited to the fullest extent possible. Missing or partial citations are due to unobtainable source information (for example, newspaper clippings with no date/author/publication title, from a personal archive).

THIS UNCONTAINABLE
FEELING OF FREEDOM

This music is the music of the hidden force of the universe
– Louis Moholo

Zürich, February 2013. A clear, cold winter’s day. Behind the city, the Alps are visible. From the main station, she’s told me, I should take tram line 3, direction Albisrieden, five stations. I’m on time, and at the Kalkbreite station she’s waiting for me: Irène Schweizer, pianist, avant-gardist, icon of Swiss and European free jazz and of the Anti-Apartheid and Women’s Movements. From here, it’s only a few minutes’ walk to her home on the Feldstrasse, in the Aussersihl district. She’s a little nervous, because her heating system picked today to break down. Despite this, we sit in her kitchen, drink tea, and begin to talk about her life. This is visibly difficult for her; she has never been a voluble artist. In preparation for our first meeting, she looked up some articles about herself—documents that she considers important and that were used as the basis for a documentary film about her, made by Gitta Gsell. But she hasn’t collected anything more than this, she says. There’s one longer article that she thinks is particularly good, in which she recounts her life in fifteen pages. More than that isn’t really necessary, she says. She opens up to questions reluctantly. Other people, she says, can certainly tell you more about her. Her companions, musicians, artists, friends, and neighbors. Her family. A few days later, she sends a list of names: companions in her life, or at least part of it. After this, we meet regularly in her apartment. Always in her kitchen, with the balcony overlooking the inner courtyard, where she sat in the past with Günter Baby Sommer and so many other musical colleagues and friends. Not in her studio, where her piano (a Grotrian-Steinweg) and computer reside. Not in her living room, between the paintings—one by Sonja Sekula, which Schweizer bought, and one by Gottfried Honegger, who invited her to choose one from his studio—and among her books, her movies, and an impressive collection of jazz records from the late 1950s to now. Amidst these markers of her life, her apartment is very well-organized and tidy; everything is in its place, as if she needed this orderly framework so that, within it, she could have a place to break the order, to split it open. To deploy this physical force, playing with her forearms and the edges of her hands, with cymbals and beaters, the work on the keys, the strings, the piano’s entire body. Jagged fragments woven into melodies as fine as spiderwebs.

A year and a half later: November 2014. A welcoming fall day. The Zürich “unerhört!” festival, which she co-founded, is in full swing. When I ring her bell at the appointed time, she’s surprised to see me—she thought I was coming the next day. Despite this, she invites me into her kitchen. In the months preceding and following this, there were many meetings and conversations: with her producer, Patrik Landolt of Intakt Records; with her musical companions of many years, Louis Moholo, Pierre Favre, and Han Bennink; with Maggie Nicols and Joelle Léandre; with Jost Gebers, longtime head of Free Music Production (FMP); with Peter Brötzmann and Alexander von Schlippenbach, comrades from the FMP era; with English saxophonist Evan Parker; with Niklaus Troxler, director of the Willisau jazz festival; with her American colleagues Andrew Cyrille and George Lewis; with Swiss saxophonist Co Streiff; with Rosmarie A. Meier, sociologist and founder of the Canaille festival in Switzerland; and with many more. These interviews, nearly 100 of them, are the basis of the present book, together with countless articles and liner notes from newspaper archives, the archive of the Darmstadt Jazz Institute, and Intakt Records, the record label that has promoted, distributed, and documented her work since 1984.

On this day in November 2014 she has a surprise for me: five file boxes full of articles she’s collected over four decades, from 1968 to 2008. Later that evening, when I tell Patrik Landolt about it, he tells me he’s heard about these boxes, but has never seen them. The fact that she has not only shown them to me, but has given them to me in a huge trunk to take to Berlin, is a real show of trust. With her life literally in my briefcase, I set out on my journey.

Childhood in the Landhaus: The Innkeeper’s Daughter

Schaffhausen, June 2, 1941: on this Whit Monday in early summer, Irène Schweizer was born, the second daughter of Frieda and Karl Schweizer, restauranteurs in Schaffhausen, the northernmost city in Switzerland. Next door, Germany was at war with the rest of the world. In this city close to the border, bomb alerts were frequently heard, forcing the family to retreat to one of the air raid shelters. Three-year-old sister Lotte and baby Irène were joined in 1942 by Margrit, the youngest (the Schweizers’ first child, Helene, had died of a blood disease in 1936, at the age of nine months). Karl and Frieda ran the Restaurant Landhaus, across from the train station, which Karl rented from the local agricultural cooperative. This was not the picturesque part of the medieval city, with its wooden gabled houses. It was much more a working-class neighborhood. World War II had been raging for two years, and was now pressing against the border of Switzerland. Despite their declared neutrality, the Swiss had to perform military service at the border to secure it. This meant that Karl often had to be away from the family for long periods of time, during which Frieda had to take care of the inn and the children by herself. In 1941, Schaffhausen had a population of about 22,000; today it is almost 36,000.

When Schweizer was just 18 days old, the first meeting of the Schaffhausen Trust Agency was held in the Restaurant Landhaus. The agency was formed to address the question of distributing produce in Switzerland. The Schaffhausen newspaper, Schaffhauser Nachrichten, later reported: “As World War II drew ever closer to our country, measures were taken to ensure normal distribution of vegetable products within the country. Following the trust agencies successfully initiated and operating in Basel, Bern, Graubunden, Lucerne, and Zürich, such an agency was also started in Schaffhausen and in other areas.” (SN, January 17, 1948).

Functions and events of all kinds regularly took place in the main hall of the Landhaus, and the Schaffhausen paper reported on them as well. The paper was founded in 1861 and operated until 1940 as the Schaffhauser Intelligenzblatt; since then it has been known as the Schaffhauser Nachrichten. The paper often reported on gatherings in the decorated banquet hall: “On December 2, 1949, 72 women from the working school commissions of 31 communities gathered at the Restaurant Landhaus. The Schaffhausen Charitable Women’s Association was represented by its president and two members of the board, and the teachers’ association and school commission of the city of Schaffhausen were represented by four members. The topic of discussion was ‘Education of girls of post-school age.’” (SN, December 9, 1949).

Schweizer relates that before he became the innkeeper at the Gasthaus, her father Karl traveled all over Switzerland as a cook, “from hotel to hotel, from season to season. He worked all over, in the most important hotels, especially in Lucerne. That’s how he met my mother, when she was also working there. My father, who originally came from Hallau, wanted to open his own restaurant with my mother in Schaffhausen, and was able to rent this Landhaus. The offices of the Agricultural Association were also in the building. There was a room for meetings, parties and weddings, and, above that, there was our very large apartment, where the employees also lived. The assistant cook, the kitchen maid, and the house boy all had a room there. I shared a room with my younger sister.”

Schweizer’s younger sister, Margrit Schlatter, remembers the Landhaus, which was torn down in 1999: “The innkeeper’s house was on the other side of the tracks, where workers lived. The restaurant did very good business, especially as long as my father was cooking there. It was actually the most popular restaurant in Schaffhausen, the place to eat. That meant that my parents could save a little money so that we children could have some opportunities. All the farmers came to the inn, but also businesspeople from Schaffhausen came to eat lunch there on Sundays. Many clubs also met there, because on the first floor there was the hall with the piano.”

The origin and history of the Landhaus restaurant was closely connected to the farmers’ political movement at the beginning of the 20th century, and also influenced the milieu in which Schweizer grew up. “In the first decades of this century, a mood of optimism prevailed among the Schaffhausen farmers: throughout the canton, agricultural cooperatives were set up to help the mainly small farms to help themselves. In 1911, the Agricultural Cooperative Association of Schaffhausen [Landwirtschaftlicher Genossenschaftsverband Schaffhausen, GVS] was founded as a member of the Cantonal Agricultural Association [Kantonaler Landwirtschaftlicher Verein, KLV]. In 1914, the GVS rented space in the old peat shed on Spitalstrasse. In 1920, they acquired a storage area in a good location near the railway station and built their own mill. In 1918 the farmers asserted their right to have their voice heard politically and founded the Schaffhausen Farmers’ Party. From 1924 to 1928 they held three of five government-mandated seats as representatives.” (SN, April 1, 1999).

In 1932, the GVS went into the wine business, and a new building was opened, with its own meeting room and restaurant. The new “Landhaus” quickly became a center for agricultural trade for the entire region from Trasandingen to Stein am Rhein, and from Bargen to Rüdlingen. The GVS management and farmers’ secretariat, as well as the editorial staff of their own daily journal, the Schaffhauser Bauer, had their offices in the Landhaus. The hall hosted not only all of the cantonal farmers’ meetings, but also events such as a “Charlottenfels school examination post-party with folk tunes from Lüpfig, followed by student theater.” The well-run restaurant on the ground floor was also popular with those of differing political persuasions. On Saturday mornings for years, it was a meeting place for a rather unusual group from the city: “Walther Bringolf, Hermann Erb, Hermann Huber, Georg Leu, Armin Walter, and other true believers wearing the broad black hats of the then Socialist Workers’ Party felt right at home ‘with the farmers.’ Meanwhile, at the piano in the hall the host’s daughter—the now world-famous jazz pianist Irène Schweizer—could often be heard practicing” (SN, April 1, 1999). Schweizer was 18 years old when, on the night of February 25, 1960, a major fire destroyed most of the farmers’ center. Only the Landhaus survived.

The Landhaus restaurant and inn

Daily Family Business: Guests First

Day-to-day family life in the inn was organized around the opening hours of the restaurant. According to Schweizer, the kitchen maid was responsible for getting the schoolchildren out of bed and giving them breakfast. “I never knew when the employees got up, or where they had breakfast. The restaurant was always open until half past midnight, and then everyone went to bed late. The restaurant didn’t open before 9 AM, so we children were awake before that and had to go to school. We didn’t get anything to eat until all the guests had been served, the guests always came first. On Sunday afternoons, we were fed around 3 o’clock. There was a little room downstairs where the family and the employees ate.”

Father: Cooking for 100

Karl Schweizer was born January 2, 1902 in Hallau, a small town in the Blauburgunder wine region around Schaffhausen. He trained as a cook and worked in various restaurants in Switzerland, including in Lucerne, where he met Schweizer’s mother, Frieda Bösch. At the Landhaus, Karl did the cooking, while Frieda was responsible for the buffet. “We had a waitstaff: one woman who was temporary help and one who was a permanent employee. My mother organized all that. They both always had a lot to do; they worked themselves to death. My father died of a heart attack suddenly one day. I don’t remember him ever being sick. He just overexerted himself. He did a crazy amount of work. In the hall there were a lot of gatherings, and he would cook for 100 people. Really, innkeepers like that shouldn’t have had children. They hardly had any time for the children.”

Schweizer’s sister Margrit says that the meeting hall was booked almost every Saturday: “About 100 people would be there. Sometimes there were concerts, or the city musicians rehearsed there. And whenever the hall wasn’t occupied, our older sister Lotte played there, from the time she was a small child. Later Irène did too, of course—they always went to play piano as soon as they were able and had the time.” Their father sang in the men’s chorus, and probably also had a clarinet, which the children later found among his possessions. Margrit thinks that Irène’s musicality came from their father, “who could pick up any instrument and play something on it. I remember him playing fiddle and harmonica. He was never allowed to learn to play an instrument as a boy. He probably would have been quite a good musician if he had had time and had learned an instrument.” Schweizer commented: “Unfortunately, when I started playing piano he wasn’t there to hear it.”

Their memories of their childhood are fragile and selective. Schweizer remembers only a few hours spent with her father: “We didn’t have a car then, and my father couldn’t drive. But I know that he took me with him sometimes when he went somewhere in the country with a guest, visiting other inns. Afternoons, when he had a few hours free. Sometimes it was just me with them, sometimes my little sister was there also. Then I sat in the back, we’d stop for something to eat, and I was allowed to have a Fanta or a cola. Once I felt so bad that I threw up in the car—he was a little angry with me about that.” Margrit describes their father as “very emotional. Chefs are all a little like that, trying things out and getting upset when they don’t work. Irène gets impatient very quickly, and our father was like that too. If things don’t go the way she wants, or she has to wait, she also has this impatience. And she was already like that as a small child. She’d throw something out the window on impulse, not even knowing what she was doing. Once she broke a windowpane that way, just in the moment, in a frenzy.” Irène, though, doesn’t remember her father that way: “My father was a very energetic man—people said he had a short temper. I probably inherited that, as a child I also had a short temper. If I didn’t like something, I flipped out and broke things. I was very impulsive.”

Mother: Always Working

Their mother, Frieda Sophie (née Bösch), was born October 8, 1907 in Lucerne. She had to work as a waitress from a young age. Margrit remembers: “Our father died very young. Our mother was very busy and had little time for the three of us children. Irène soon created her own world to live in. It was a similar story for my oldest sister, Lotte – she left quickly and, after interning in Vevey, lived in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. She didn’t come home until our mother fell ill; then she found work here in Schaffhausen and stayed with her mother until she died. But the three of us never really had what I’d call a close family life. When I was 17 or 18, our mother couldn’t go on any longer, she had simply worked too much. At the end, she only lived a couple of years apart from the restaurant before she died.”

Schweizer says her mother had always wanted to be a dancer, “and my younger sister had a little ballet career—she learned ballet, the ballet school held classes in our hall, and she danced ballet for years. My mother liked that direction, but she never forced us to do anything. Later, she knew that I played in Berlin and all over, but she never said anything about it, and she didn’t really know what I did. We were raised freely and our mother trusted us. At night, we could’ve brought men home with us, the bar was open until half past midnight. But maybe because we weren’t being watched so closely, we weren’t really interested in doing anything stupid. Nor was Lotte. She had a boyfriend, a pianist, and I had many friends, including the ones from school, and we visited each other.” She felt the lack of parental affection, even if this was partly compensated for by Odette, the server in the restaurant who took care of the children and who Schweizer calls her “second mother.” “My mother had no idea, never said anything about it, that in 1960 I won first prize at the amateur festival in Zürich. We didn’t talk about it.”

The Schweizer family, 1940s. From left: Frieda, Margrit, Karl, Irène, Lotte

Lotte: The Older Sister

Lotte was born January 30, 1938. Margrit says that their father was very proud of Lotte’s gifts: “He even bought the piano. She went to the music school in Schaffhausen, and the teacher always praised how well she played. She gave her first performance when she was eight years old—our father was very proud. He wasn’t around long enough for Irène to have much time with him, which is a pity. But he was fiercely supportive of Lotte.” Later, Lotte underwent psychiatric treatment repeatedly, and “was in the psychiatric clinic for a relatively long time on two or three occasions. She just couldn’t adapt to life. She didn’t try anything new; she was no longer interested in anything, really. Quite different from Irène—I’ve always admired that about her, she has so many interests, political, musical, she loves to visit museums. Lotte didn’t do any of that. She withdrew completely and lived entirely alone. And she hardly played piano anymore. She had a job, and she played at home or for her girlfriend, when she came over. Or when there was a party she was often asked to play, and she always did. At some point, everything became too much for her. She reduced her working hours, first from 100 % to 80 %, and later less than that. In fact, Lotte could play anything on the piano, it was incredible, she was really talented, particularly with Chopin. But she was never able to make anything of her gifts. Sometimes with Irène as well I get the feeling that she doesn’t like to be alone; luckily she now has such a dear partner. I’m really happy that she has someone. Because she’s not a simple person, who would be able to live happily by herself.”

When she was a child, Schweizer was given a concertina. “I took some lessons, and later I was a member of the Schaffhausen concertina club. We often rehearsed together, and played folk songs and hits from sheet music. Later, my parents bought a full-size accordion. That didn’t work, it was much too large for me, I didn’t like it. I stuck it in the corner and changed over to my sister’s piano in the living room. Lotte had piano lessons for years and played classical piano very well. She had private instruction, but she never wanted to become a teacher.”

Margrit: The Younger Sister

Schweizer’s younger sister, Margrit Schlatter, was born September 30, 1942 in Schaffhausen. She worked as a pharmacist. “I’m married and we have a son. And I was working, we had our own business, and for 20 years I didn’t have much time to spend with my sisters. But now we are in contact more often, and I like that.”

Odette: Server as Second Mother

Odette, the server in the Landhaus, played an important role in the Schweizer household. Schweizer relates that she was very involved in taking care of the children: “she knitted things for us and took us to the Rhine Falls, or even to Zürich when she had the time. She devoted a lot of attention to us; she was my second mother. Odette always had one free day a week, while my mother never had a day off, because the restaurant was always open, every day.” Odette’s father was French, “and she spoke perfect French. She grew up in the canton of Bern, and her father was a language teacher in Schaffhausen; her mother had passed away. From my point of view, her father was already ancient; he might have been 60 or 70, but to me he seemed like an old man. Odette was around 30 when we were children. She was a very beautiful young woman.”

Margrit remembers: “During the war, our father was sometimes away for a few weeks for national defense. Of course, our mother was then incredibly burdened. I don’t think we ever really did anything with our father, he never had time. Odette was very busy taking care of the guests, she was very fast and she had the reputation in town of providing really good service. The primary school and secondary school were only five minutes away, and the canton school was also close by. Odette’s father had a language school at the top of Herrenacker Street, near the city theater. It was a beautiful old house with a schoolroom and a small apartment. Odette was our second mother, sometimes she went swimming with us, or went along with us wherever we children wanted to go. She watched over us closely. She was involved in our upbringing, but you could say that we took care of ourselves and brought each other up to some extent. We were very much left to ourselves.”

The Piano in the Festival Hall: I Had no Idea

In the Landhaus there were three pianos: in the hall, in the small sitting room, and in the apartment on the upper floor. Margrit remembers that first Lotte took classical piano lessons, “and then Irène started to play concertina. But she suddenly changed to the piano; she didn’t want to have anything more to do with the concertina. And after that she played piano, but of course it wasn’t in a classical direction, it was jazz. From the beginning. She also had piano lessons for a little while, but after that she was completely self-taught. The piano was a bond between Lotte and Irène, of course. For our mother, how should I say it, this was always a crazy world. She never really understood it, probably because she was born in a time when there was absolutely no jazz in Switzerland. She liked Johann Strauss, operettas, that kind of thing. She thought jazz was awful, she never understood it. Besides classical music, Lotte also played piano in her friend’s Dixieland band. At the beginning, Irène also played boogie-woogie and ragtime, but the band was very well-behaved, I never saw anything wild.”

Once a week, Schweizer took piano lessons from a young teacher, Erwin Schnell. She remembers: “he had some sheet music of pieces by Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan, he was actually quite open-minded. I studied Bach with him, but I always had a hard time reading music. I really just wanted to play jazz.” The money for the piano lessons wasn’t a problem for their mother: “We just had to want to do it. Until I was finished with school I had piano lessons once a week, and then later in the French-speaking part of Switzerland too, and in England all I did was rehearse with musicians. I practiced a lot and worked out for myself how the chords went. Sometimes saxophonist Rolf Oechslin, who knew the chord changes to all the tunes, wrote some things down. Later he worked as a teacher near Schaffhausen.” From a young age, she always watched the hands of the pianist in the festival hall, “looking to see what he was doing, how he played. At that time I still had no idea at all about jazz or notes; I didn’t know anything. I always listened carefully, that was the beginning, and later when I heard music, I was very attentive to who was doing what. I was also fascinated with drummers—for many years I played drums, self-taught. I learned the most when I was living in London. Back then you still couldn’t get the Real Book, which has melodies and chord symbols for all the important jazz pieces, to play from, and anyway reading music was frowned upon. So I always wanted to learn everything by ear. And I always paid close attention to the musicians’ stage presence and how they acted when they played.”

World War II: In the Air Raid Shelter

Sometimes Margrit has the feeling that her sister Irène “can’t really remember anything, or doesn’t want to. Her childhood and youth seem to have bounced off her. She really doesn’t remember anything. Schaffhausen was the city in Switzerland that was the most affected by the war. Sometimes she’ll talk about how she was outside on her tricycle when the bombs came, and was quickly taken into the air raid shelter. She remembers that, but that’s it.”

Schweizer says that on the day when the Schaffhausen train station was bombed, all the windows in the Landhaus burst, “and we had to go into the air raid shelter every time a bomb fell. Schaffhausen was being bombed by the Americans—they thought it was Germany because it was so close to the border. My father was a private, an ordinary soldier, and he often had to go perform service. So my mother was often alone during the war.”

On March 28, 2014, in a piece called “When the Americans Bombed Schaffhausen,” the Swiss television channel SRF reported on the bombing of Schaffhausen on April 1, 1944. Schweizer was two and a half years old:

On April 1st, the bells will ring in the town of Schaffhausen. On this day exactly 70 years ago, this border town on the Rhine was attacked by the US Air Force. Around 400 bombs left behind a devastated city. This was during the Second World War. Switzerland—surrounded by warring countries—sought to preserve its neutrality and sovereignty without offending any of the countries at war. But, on April 1, 1944, one and a half years before the end of the war, Switzerland was caught between the fronts. At 10:58 AM, the US Air Force dropped 371 bombs over Schaffhausen. The bombing lasted 40 seconds. After it was over, 37 people were dead, hundreds injured, over 300 homeless, even more without food and desperate. Was the USA punishing Switzerland for supplying industrial goods to Nazi Germany from SIG Neuhausen in Schaffhausen? The official explanation is: no, Schaffhausen was the victim of a navigational error on the part of the US Air Force. The bomb squadron, departing from Great Britain, was supposed to attack the German town Ludwigshafen. Historian Matthias Wipf, who lives in Schaffhausen, is also convinced that the US pilots made an error: ‘The mission was a total disaster,’ says Wipf in Schweiz aktuell. ‘The US Air Force pilots got lost after setting out via England and France. Radar technology was new at the time, and in this case it stopped working,’ says Wipf. ‘The pilots had no idea where they were.’ Tragically, fifteen aircraft then bombed Schaffhausen. It is known that during the Second World War the air raid alarm sounded more than 500 times in Schaffhausen. Usually nothing happened, and the people got used to it. When the alarm went off again on April 1, 1944 at 11 o’clock in the morning, many Schaffhausen residents did not seek cover in the air-raid shelters. Instead, they ran out onto the street to see where the planes were. ‘It was almost considered an entertaining spectacle,’ says Wipf. He estimates that the number of deaths could have been a third less if the people had sought cover. The US President at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, later apologized to the population of Schaffhausen for the erroneous bombing. The US paid the city 40 million Swiss francs in compensation.

Children’s Room: She’d Rather Be on the Scooter

In the spacious apartment in the upper floor of the inn, Schweizer shared a room with her younger sister. Margrit remembers: “I played like other children, but we hardly ever played together. Irène didn’t play with dolls or with children’s toys. At most, she’d play outside with friends, riding a scooter or bicycle. Of course, we played jass [a popular card game in Switzerland]; almost everyone plays that here. And Irène still likes to play that game, and Monopoly, she liked that kind of game. But she never really played with toys, not even as a small child. Lotte was five years older than me. She had dolls, but she also never really played like a child. She was always pretty serious.” Unlike Margrit, who sometimes waited tables in her free time, Irène never really enjoyed helping in the restaurant, says Margrit. “She didn’t like the world of the restaurant at all.”

Rhine: Rhybadi

Like their father, according to Margrit, Irène felt very at home in the water. Even in their looks, she sees great similarities between Irène and their father, “especially around the eyes. Her personality is also very similar to our father’s. In the summer, we went to the Rhine public swimming pool, the Rhybadi, almost every day. My father liked that. He often went swimming after cooking. He really enjoyed the water. He taught our sister Lotte to swim. There was a kind of belt, a rope, you could tie it around yourself, and then you could walk above, and below she would swim, and he was walking, and at some point he just dropped the rope and said, ‘now you can swim.’ In the Rhybadi you can see fish when the river is calm. In the early part of the year, when the snow melts in the mountains, a lot of water comes down, and then the river is fast and wild. But in the summer it’s quite calm. Outside Schaffhausen, there was a meadow, the Spitzwiese. We went ice skating there in the winter; we had blades that you could tie to your shoes.”

1951, Father’s Death: “Closed Today Due to a Death in the Family”

On Tuesday, February 27, 1951, the Landhaus restaurant in Schaffhausen was closed for the day due to a death in the family: Irène Schweizer’s father died unexpectedly at the age of 49. Irène was nine years old. On February 23, the Schaffhausen newspaper reported:

It is with great sorrow that we inform our relatives, friends, and acquaintances that our dear, unforgettable husband, son, father, brother, brother-in-law, and uncle, Karl Schweizer, chef and innkeeper of the Landhaus in Schaffhausen, was taken from us this morning at 10:00. He died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 49. We ask you to keep the memory of our dear Karl in your thoughts and in your hearts. In deep mourning: his wife, Frieda Schweizer; mother, Hermione Schweizer-Surbeck; children, Lotti, Irène, and Margrit; brother, Alfred Schweizer and family, Wallisellen, and other relatives. The funeral service will take place on Tuesday, February 27, 1951, at 1:30 PM at the Waldfriedhof in Schaffhausen.

The Agricultural Association of the canton of Schaffhausen wrote: “For fifteen years, he put all of his energy into the service of the job he had taken on, and he successfully developed his business. We will always remember him with gratitude and honor.” The Schaffhausen men’s choir wrote in their obituary: “It is our sad duty to report the sudden departure of our dear member Karl Schweizer, innkeeper at the Landhaus. The memorial service will take place on Tuesday, February 27, at 1:30 PM in the Waldfriedhof. We hope that as many singers as possible will give our dear departed colleague his funeral cortege. Meeting at 1:15 in the Waldfriedhof.”

The Innkeepers’ Association of the canton of Schaffhausen also paid their respects: “With great sorrow, we inform our colleagues of the departure of our esteemed actuary and colleague Karl Schweizer, chef of the restaurant at the Landhaus in Schaffhausen. Our friend Karl was taken suddenly by a heart attack. We offer our deepest condolences to his widow and children. Our colleague Karl Schweizer is now at rest, but his spirit lives on with us.”

“It was a terrible blow, very sad,” Schweizer remembers. “It was very difficult for my mother. With the help of relatives and some others, she kept the Landhaus going until it was no longer possible.”

Safety and Distance: Her Own World of Music

Margrit recalls that Irène distanced herself at an early age. “I don’t know why she didn’t want to have anything to do with the family for a while. Maybe, as a child, she missed the feeling of security, or that someone had time for her. She just withdrew into music, it really brought her joy.” The experience of lack of parental attention and quality time with the family had a lasting effect on Schweizer. Later, she often said that the career of an improvising musician is incompatible with the decision to become a mother.

School Days: No Shrinking Violet

Schweizer says that she was brought up in the Swiss Reformed tradition: “In school, I had religion classes, and sometimes I went to church on Sundays. My mother was Catholic, but she had a Swiss Reformed wedding, because my father wanted it. But none of us was really religious. In elementary school I was always a good student, but after my father died I didn’t do as well in school, and I failed the secondary school entrance exam. My teacher let me slide, though, because he understood that it was related to my father’s death. In secondary school, girls and boys were separated; we only saw each other during breaks. I had a very good teacher, Ortrud Gehrig. She had a warm personality, she was clever, and even at that time she was emancipated—she was no shrinking violet.” (In: Heinz Nigg, Wir sind wenige, aber wir sind alle [We Are Few, but We Are All], Limmat 2008, pp. 56–66).

“At the young age of 12 I fell in love with my teacher, and later with classmates. But there was no discussion of this then—it was taboo. I already knew at the time that same-sex love existed, and I had read a little about it in gossip magazines. Being gay was stigmatized, and what talk there was, was mostly about gay men; there were no lesbians in these gossip rags. It was painful for me already then. But I knew: I have music, it will get me through, I get so much from it!” (In: Nigg, pp. 56–66).

As a child, Schweizer spent a lot of time listening to the radio. “My favorite was a jazz program that was on Saturday afternoons at five, on the French station in Sottens. By the time I went to secondary school, we had a record player in the restaurant office. My sister and I often listened to Dixieland there.” (In: Nigg, pp. 56–66).

Margrit describes Irène as “pretty quiet. In school she did her homework and was very conscientious and punctual. She was a very good student and didn’t cause any problems. She did an extra year. Eight years of school are obligatory—five years of elementary school and three years of secondary school—but in Schaffhausen, it’s also possible to add a fourth and fifth year. Those are more like vocational training, and after the fourth year she went to Lucens, to a girls’ institute. After that, she attended the Raeber School, a trade school in Zürich. The girls at Lucens were mostly from wealthy families, but my mother thought that would be good for Irène. Probably also because they taught a little home economics, and Irène hated that kind of thing—cooking, cleaning, all that. I don’t think she was unhappy at all in Lucens. She got along well with others there and played piano a lot. In Schaffhausen, in the secondary school, her teacher already noticed that she didn’t like household work. So the teacher told her that she could go play piano in the auditorium. And after that Irène realized she could always find a way to the piano.”

The students went to school on foot, or by bicycle. Everything was close by, says Schweizer: “I probably walked to elementary school, and then rode my bike to secondary school. I was in primary school for five years, and after that I was in the first secondary level. Actually, I should have gone for eight years, but I wanted to take another year because I didn’t know what to do. So all together I was in school for nine years. I didn’t have a plan, I felt much too young to decide on a career, but then my mother sent me to the French-speaking part of the country. After my father’s death, she didn’t have any time for me. All the well-to-do families sent their daughters to French-speaking Switzerland to learn French and home economics. It was a boarding school, all our classes were in French, and there was a lot of emphasis on good behavior. The Swiss have a reputation for knowing languages: Italian, French, German, Swiss German. There was an emphasis on language, because we are a country of languages. We learned French in school, but after school was done, no one could speak French. After that I spent a year in England, because I wanted to learn English more than French anyway.”

Jazz in the Festival Hall: First Contact with Jazz

Every Saturday night there was an event in the festival hall, usually until the early morning hours. “Sometimes our mother woke us up and said, ‘come quickly, something good is happening,’” Schweizer remembers. “Sometimes it was cabaret, or folk theater like Ueli der Knecht, by Jeremias Gotthelf” (In: Nigg, pp. 56–66). But the hall hosted more than meetings, dance, and regional theater. “When I started playing Dixieland with bands in Schaffhausen, at first I played drums. I got in contact with other musicians through Lotte’s boyfriend, who was the pianist in a Dixieland group. They played music on the side; they were all amateurs who rehearsed here in the hall. I always went to listen, and one day I heard a quartet, Four Ones, with four students who had rented the hall. This was on a Saturday afternoon. It was a quartet with saxophone, piano, bass, and drums, and it made me very curious because I’d never heard music like that before. Then I found out that they were playing pieces by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and that’s how I heard modern jazz for the first time. I was totally fascinated, obsessed. The Four Ones were Werner Bührer, alto saxophone, Stefan Fröhlich, drums, Aldino Corchia, bass—he was a ‘secondo,’ an Italian living in Schaffhausen—and Thomas Amsler, piano. They were students at the cantonal school. Schaffhausen was really in the sticks. At first we played Dixieland mixed with a little bit of modern jazz, so without banjo and with tenor saxophone. We called ourselves the Crazy Stokers. I was the youngest; the others were at most two years older than me. We were very proud when the Schaffhausen newspaper wrote about us. At our performances, I wore a skirt and a blouse and the men wore suits, ties, and white nylon shirts. It was very restrained.”

The Schaffhausen newspaper wrote about Irène Schweizer for the first time on August 17, 1957. She had just turned 16. “Jazz meeting with the Crazy Stokers. Last Saturday, the Landhaus seemed to be the meeting place for all the jazz fans in Schaffhausen. Hundreds of expectant young people filled the hall from the beginning of the concert, and crowds had to be turned away for lack of space. Some had to remain standing, while the rest left. This concert once again demonstrated the great popularity of our local jazz band. These musicians, only 17 and 18 years old, showed astounding gifts and did justice to their name, Crazy Stokers. From the first piece, ‘Pretty Little Missy,’ the group’s signature tune, the crowd was excited, and the band kept them that way the entire evening, judging by the constant bursts of spontaneous applause. Even when experiments took the upper hand over perfected skill, significant movements in the direction of modern jazz could be heard. Connoisseurs took note of, among others, the modern version of ‘Lullaby of Birdland,’ played by the young guest pianist Irène Schweizer in the style of the famous ‘block chord’ pianist Errol Garner.”

Jazz Amateurs: The Crazy Stokers

Since the age of 19, Schweizer has bought and collected jazz records. Her first ones, by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, are still in her collection today. “At the end of the 1950s, Radio Kaiser was selling the first LPs by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk. At first I found Ornette Coleman pretty weird, but I still liked it. And Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things.’ I bought that one right away. You could actually buy that in Schaffhausen. Anyway, we bought every important record that came out—at that time there were four or five a year.”

She was never actually interested in attracting a lot of attention with her music. On the contrary: “We earned very little from music. The audience at our concerts in the inn were schoolmates; my whole class from school, they all came to Schaffhausen and listened. They loved it. I couldn’t stand the girls who read Bravo, listened to rock and roll, loved Elvis Presley—I thought all that was awful. For me, Dixieland and modern jazz were what I wanted to play and listen to. Back then people still danced to our music. We played a lot of private parties and there was always dancing. I still remember very clearly the time we had a well-paid gig near Schaffhausen. It was a wedding party and we drove there in a car. But I was so pissed off the entire night that I could hardly play, because it was the Friday—April 8, 1960—when Miles Davis played in the Zürich Kongresshaus with John Coltrane. It almost killed me that I had to play this wedding instead of hearing that. I would’ve loved so much to see the concert in Zürich, it was really a catastrophe.”

Crazy Stokers, March 1957: Werner Lempen, trombone; Rolf Oechslin, alto saxophone; Irène Schweizer, piano; Ruedi Lempen, trumpet; Charly Speichinger, clarinet; Paul Rodel, banjo; Dino Corchia, bass. Not visible: Herbie Velder, drums.

Schaffhausen: The Step Across the Tracks

Already as an 18-year-old, Schweizer fled the narrow conservatism of her hometown. She never returned to Schaffhausen: “The old city here, especially, is nothing but a backdrop, beautifully made up and clean. Always so clean. You hardly see anyone on the street. It’s incredibly quiet and everything is beautiful. The Bureau of Tourism calls Schaffhausen ‘The Little Paradise.’ I wanted to go out into the wide world. Here everyone knows everyone; when you went around the old city, you knew everyone you saw. It was just a hick town. But today I enjoy going back, it’s a nice city, with the Rhine, good shops, good restaurants, and some things are happening culturally.”

Writer and journalist Isolde Schaad, born in Schaffhausen in 1944, remembers hearing talk of a brilliant pianist who played at the inn. “She grew up in the inn, the innkeeper’s daughter, and she started playing there when she was quite a young girl. When I went to high school, we had only heard about her playing. At that time we hadn’t made this step across the tracks. It was like another world. And it wasn’t possible to just go there, because there weren’t any formal performances, it was just the daughter of the house who played there. She’s a few years older than I am, and I have to say that in the 1950s and 1960s Schaffhausen was really a town of strict class differences. Irène was from the working-class part of town, and I was part of the middle class. We really had no contact. I never personally met her in Schaffhausen, only later in Zürich. The petty-bourgeois establishment didn’t want to have anything to do with this wild music. But I was about to enter my wild years; I was already something of a rebel then, but I passed my university qualifying exam and went to Zürich to study. There she played in the jazz club Africana, where internationally known musicians were already appearing. Those included expatriate South Africans like Abdullah Ibrahim, who was still going by the name Dollar Brand then, and this young woman. They sat down and just played. They say that the prophet has to be recognized abroad before being appreciated at home. That’s an old pattern, and especially with this wild music it took time for it to happen.”

The founder and director of the Schaffhausen Jazz Festival, Urs Röllin, first saw Schweizer playing with Pierre Favre in the Kammgarn. “It really made an impression on me. I almost couldn’t believe that she was from Schaffhausen. At that time I was in my early twenties, the Kammgarn was full, and I couldn’t make head or tail of free improvisation. In those days I was still listening to Led Zeppelin. I was at the concert with my girlfriend at the time and when, on a Sunday, we were invited to lunch at her parents’ place, I told them about this concert. My girlfriend came from a very musical family, and when I told them about Irène Schweizer her mother said ‘yes, we lived next to her upstairs.’ The mother was an organist in the church and was musically very talented, but then she added ‘but Irène can’t play piano. She always practiced the same thing, hundreds of times. I could’ve played it after playing through it once or twice. But she would practice the same passage over and over, I didn’t understand it.’ That was my first encounter with Irène Schweizer. I didn’t understand the mother’s criticism at all. I myself practiced guitar like that; I learned blues solos by ear and repeated them hundreds of times. When she said that I knew these were two different worlds.”

“That repressed attitude is also typical for Schaffhausen. Classical musicians who just go to their music lessons don’t understand when someone repeats the same piece hundreds of times. But working on nuances is actually the key to music. Sometimes you sense that Irène is concealing something, that she doesn’t want to be noticed. But when she is with other musicians, she’s completely different. Maybe Irène doesn’t want to be recognized on the street, but in the important places, people know who she is. It’s really a great development that neither the city nor the canton, nor the people who have to do with culture, have the slightest doubt that she has made a truly great career. Irène was already well known; even in Schaffhausen she won prizes. But of course there were also people in Schaffhausen who made fun of her a little bit, envied her, didn’t want to understand.”

“In Zürich, on the other hand, there’s often this cutting tone, ‘we’re the real thing.’ That’s why I can actually understand that even though she’s lived in Zürich for a long time, she’s remained a woman from Schaffhausen. She still speaks Schaffhausen German—I see that as her way of expressing pride that she’s from Schaffhausen. Even if she’s happy to have gotten out. Anyway, it’s too narrow there for someone who doesn’t want to have a regular job and that kind of environment. When I came back from Los Angeles, Zürich felt like just as much of a backwater as Schaffhausen.”

“As a woman, as a musician, she’s accomplished so much. She grew up in Schaffhausen, had a job, and came to free jazz fairly late, but then changed that world in such a concentrated way, as well as the Women’s Movement, when she came out. For her it’s a matter of course; she’s so convincing about it. For her it’s completely normal, nothing special, and she also doesn’t think that now she has to play everywhere. That might also be a bit of a Schaffhausen mentality. One wants to get away from the narrow anxiety of that town, while also being proud of your home. The very direct manner that people prize in Zürich, we don’t like that so much. There’s this reserved character that I know from Schaffhausen. People are self-assured, they do what they want to, but they don’t really want to make a big deal about it, it’s more ‘yeah, I’m here.’ In what I do, sometimes I have the feeling that I’d be happy if it were more accepted, or liked, or tolerated, but on the other hand you have the feeling that yes, this is totally normal. That person’s going to work, I’m going to the concert. People from Schaffhausen aren’t interested in hype.”

“It’s certainly that way for Irène too: ‘Playing in the concert hall is great, but I don’t want or need to make a big deal about it.’ That’s a typical Schaffhausen attitude: I do my thing, and I’ve been doing it for a long time, and now other people are taking notice, but I’m not interested in that. It’s a very nice way to be, and I’m very familiar with it in Irène’s case. It’s the strength to say ‘I’m sitting down here, and the king or anyone might be there, but I’m going to play my thing, and if they don’t like it they can go home, I’m going to do it.’ That focus is unique. She sits down, starts playing, stops, done. Leaves the stage and talks to me about her sisters. It’s quite funny.”

Swiss drummer Lucas Niggli (born 1968) is familiar with Schaffhausen: his grandparents lived there, and it’s his mother’s hometown. “Irène was born the same year as my mother, and her birthday is one day after my mother’s. My mother can also be hardheaded, but I don’t think that’s a typical Schaffhausen characteristic. I think it was a big influence on Irène that her parents were innkeepers, and also maybe being close to Germany, that already gives you a kind of flexibility, more than in the interior of Switzerland. If you live at the border, maybe you’re more willing to cross boundaries.”

The Modern Jazz Preachers, 1958–1961: the Legacy of Art Blakey

In August 1958, the Modern Jazz Preachers from Schaffhausen, featuring 17-year-old Irène Schweizer at the piano, took part for the first time in the Winterthur qualifying round for the 8th National Amateur Jazz Festival in Zürich.

“The inclination towards modern sounds is a general phenomenon in jazz that has increased more and more in the last few years. The Schaffhausen combo with the ambitious name ‘The Modern Jazz Preachers’ plays in the classic cool style and shows notable musical ability. The members are (ladies first!): Irène Schweizer (piano), Mano Fenaroli (bass), Herbie Velder (drums), Werner Bührer (alto saxophone), and Rolf Oechslin (tenor saxophone). In Irène Schweizer, a very promising pianist, we have the rare case in which the female element makes an active appearance in an amateur jazz festival.” (SN, August 27, 1958.)

As it turned out, the Modern Jazz Preachers were selected to take part in the 1958 National Amateur Jazz Festival in Zürich.

“After spending the whole evening playing almost nothing but old and well-known jazz standards, Miles Davis’s piece ‘Four’ was like a breath of fresh air for the dutifully attentive listeners. With that piece, the Schaffhausen jazz combo, playing brilliantly, earned the greatest enthusiasm from the near-capacity audience at the Volkshaus, and made their participation in the NAJF a foregone conclusion. These young amateur musicians then proved that the success of ‘Four’ was no accident by following up with the significantly more harmonically difficult number ‘Walkin,’ in which Irène Schweizer attracted the greatest attention with her distinctive piano playing, full of ideas.” (SN, September 3, 1958.)

In 1959, the Modern Jazz Preachers took seventh place in the category “Orchestra in the Modern Style” at the 9th National Amateur Jazz Festival (NAJF). Irène Schweizer came in fourth in the soloist category for “Swing and Modern Style” on piano; the year before she had been awarded a special prize for best woman participant.

The group performed not only at the functions organized by the Schaffhausen Association of Modern Jazz Listeners (Schaffhauser Interessengemeinschaft für modernen Jazz, IGFMJ), but also sometimes at corporate functions. In March 1960, the Georg Fischer company presented an evening of music featuring the band, attended by almost 450 employees of the company, mostly young people.

A Modern Jazz Preachers concert in Singen, Germany, near the Swiss border, presented as “Jazz from Switzerland,” attracted 300 listeners. The Schaffhauser Nachrichten reported:

The trio numbers, played in the style of Errol Garner with soloist Irène Schweizer at the piano, and blues vocals by bandleader and tenor saxophonist Rolf Oechslin, were particularly well-received. This second concert by the Preachers in the Uhland concert hall in Singen was only the second time since the opening of the hall that as many as 600 people attended. Although during their first visit they played both traditionally and in the modern jazz style, this time there were no concessions to the audience, apart from the pieces presented by the Irène Schweizer Trio in the style of Erroll Garner: ‘Lullaby of Birdland’ and ‘Cheek to Cheek.’ The Preachers remained absolutely true to their modern jazz ideal, and for two hours they ‘preached’ cool and passionate hard bop, received with appreciation by the audience, which included critically sophisticated listeners. (SN, June 26, 1960.)

Gustav Sigg (1928–2017), a professional lathe operator, supported Schweizer’s early career as a musician in his free time. He wrote about her in the Schaffhausen newspaper, organized performances in Singen, and was the director of the IGFMJ. He remembers: “Irène had the good fortune to grow up in an inn. Already as a young girl, she was always around, and watched how the drummer and the pianist played. At the sound checks, she watched, and sometimes played a bit. Little by little she grew into it, she got more and more interested in music. Earlier on, even classic jazz pieces were played as dance numbers, with a swing feeling. So she got that feeling very early on. When the musicians set up their instruments in the hall, she would sit down at the drum kit. As the president of the jazz club, I was there on many such occasions, and I organized a lot of Dixieland concerts in the area near the border. Even while Irène was still in school, she found some students her own age to work with, and put together a Dixieland group. That was the classic instrumentation: piano, bass, drums. But they still didn’t have anyone to play piano. So in the mid-1950s, she appeared with a jazz band, the first and only woman in Switzerland to do so. At that time it was practically unthinkable to see a woman playing with a band of men. It was clear that she had a natural feeling for the music, and her technique was also very good. When the Dixieland group had run its course, she got curious about more modern pianists, and suddenly it was like a lightbulb went on for her, and that was it for the boogie-woogie and blues.”

“Because of World War II, for eight years we were cut off from America, the country jazz came from. The first bebop records didn’t arrive in Switzerland until after 1949, and they made people crazy. Some people were totally enthusiastic, and others, especially older people, thought those records had nothing to do with jazz. In the jazz clubs there were wild discussions. There were a lot of meetings where old and new jazz records were played, and the traditionalists always said they didn’t want to hear bebop. So then there were schisms, and new clubs were opened. I went with the modernists. At the concerts we organized, we had the problem that the audience was for the most part not ready to listen to this new music for two hours. The young men came to the concerts because of Irène, but she wasn’t interested in them. Anything having to do with sex was absolutely taboo, and anyone ‘playing for the other team’ was looked down on. We’d wear ties to the youth club we organized, and the shy girls’ parents were there chaperoning to make sure everything was safe, sheltered. It took some time for the audience to train their ears, to be able to hear the new music. The musicians working with Irène weren’t Swiss, they were German. When we put on concerts with her in Schaffhausen, people would say she was playing wrong notes. People were hostile, they wrote letters about it, but Irène just shut everything out when she played. Then we noticed that after the war, the people in Singen became more open-minded. So we started organizing concerts there. And in Germany, young people got interested in this music right away—when Irène was at the piano, people came and sat all around her, on the floor, just to hear her music. It was incredible.”

“Jazz Becomes Feminine” was the title of an article about the Swiss Amateur Jazz Festival in Zürich, which appeared in the September 8, 1960 issue of the journal Sie+Er.

In those years, the NAJF was the high point of a country-wide cellar jazz movement that attracted predominantly young listeners. On September 13, 1960, at the 10th Amateur Jazz Festival, which for the first time also included groups from outside Switzerland, Irène Schweizer was again awarded the special prize for best woman participant. In the category “group pianist,” she was awarded first prize, together with Paul Thommen (from Geneva), and in the category “group playing in the modern style” the Modern Jazz Preachers took second place. As a “gift from Zürich businesses,” the prizewinner “Miss Schweizer” was awarded a pack of cigarettes, a pack of chewing gum, and a men’s shirt.

On March 25, 1961, the Modern Jazz Preachers gave what was provisionally their final concert, in the hall of the Restaurant Falken. In a farewell tribute, the Schaffhausen newspaper celebrated the effect the band had had on the young listening audience:

The spontaneous, communal experience of a jazz concert or dance evening is very exciting for many young people, and often inspires them to seek out records in order to further explore the secrets of this rhythmically and melodically fascinating music. In this regard, the Preachers have done much good, and, in dozens of concerts, have achieved notable success. They have been particularly well received at their concerts in Germany—Singen, Konstanz, Waldshut, Tiengen—and the opinion of a German jazz expert, that the Modern Jazz Preachers are the best amateur Jazz group in the upper Rhine region, from Basel to the Bodensee, is certainly no exaggeration. In any case, no one can deny that the Preachers and their love of making music have brought joy to countless listeners, young and old. The band’s breakup, due to various professional changes in the musicians’ lives, is now a sad reality. Rolf Oechslin is taking on a position as a schoolteacher in the countryside, Mano Fenaroli is working in Zürich, Herbert Velder has completed his basic military training, Irène Schweizer is moving to England, and Wilfried Blättler is studying in Geneva. (SN, April 14, 1961).

England, 1961: First Girlfriend

In 1961 Schweizer traveled to Bournemouth, England, to improve her language skills. “I met my first girlfriend in 1961 at a language school, and had a six-year relationship with her. Her name was Monique Braun and she came from Biel. She spoke French and Swiss German. Her mother was French Swiss and her father was German Swiss. Since I didn’t like speaking French so much, we spoke English from the beginning. And one day she showed up with a copy of Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis, and I almost died. I had never known a woman who listened to or liked anything like this before, and she told me she had jazz records and that she listened to Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan, and I told her I played the piano and I loved jazz.”

“She was the first woman I met who knew something about jazz and had records. All the students lived with families, in rented rooms. Where I lived there was a piano. Monique lived with another family, and on the weekends we met and fell in love. It was very innocent and platonic between us. We didn’t want to go back to Switzerland after the language school, we wanted to go to London, so the school found au pair jobs for us. She fell in love with a bass player who lived in Bournemouth, but we remained friends. I visited her many times in Biel after we were done with school, and she also came to Zürich. She did an apprenticeship there as a nurse at the psychiatric clinic, and that was during the time when I was playing nights at the Africana. Monique got married later and had two children. Now she lives in Geneva. The separation was difficult, but we’ve stayed in touch with each other. I see her once a year; I go to Geneva, or we meet in Bern.”

Authentically Lesbian: Inner Freedom

According to Schweizer, her first girlfriend was “anyway not authentically lesbian, as I am. I already knew at school, at the age of twelve or thirteen, that I wasn’t sexually attracted to men. But it’s also true that my best friends were often men, some of the musicians were also my best friends. Feminism didn’t exist yet, and I didn’t know what it was, I just always thought, yes, there must be other women who are like me. But I was so involved in the music that I put all that to one side, I didn’t want to face it directly. The fact that I never brought a boy home with me was not an issue, no one ever brought it up or asked me about it. My mother just knew that I was friends with Monique.”

London, Ronnie Scott’s: A New Dimension

Looking back, Schweizer has always called her time in London the best time of her life. “Monique worked for a Jewish family and I worked for a very wealthy family in Chelsea Park Gardens, a very expensive neighborhood. It was a family with three children, a nanny, and a cook. And all I had to do was clean a little, dust things, bring them breakfast and do the laundry. In the morning I worked and in the afternoon I could practice at the neighbor’s place. They had a grand piano. The woman I worked for knew that I played piano, and she arranged for me to be able to practice at the neighbor’s. In London I could occasionally practice piano in a music school in the afternoons, they rented the room by the hour for rehearsals, and my employer also arranged that for me.”

Schweizer also took jazz piano lessons in London: “When I was an au pair in London, Eddie Thompson was my teacher. The bass player, who liked to flirt with Monique, sometimes played in a trio with Eddie, a blind pianist who also taught lessons. So I got his address and phone number, and I took the tube to his place every two weeks. It was almost 45 minutes away. He was a classic modern jazz pianist who knew all the standards, and I learned to play all the important standards with him, like ‘But Not For Me’ and ‘The Man I Love’—everything you had to be able to play back then. He was very nice, a good pianist, and he was well-known in London. That was actually the only time when I really had jazz lessons, with Eddie Thompson, and very briefly also with Terry Shannon, who performed regularly at Ronnie Scott’s. Apart from that I taught myself everything by listening to records and rehearsing with other musicians. Learning by doing.”

On her days off Schweizer met Monique, “we went to the cinema in the evening and we experienced ‘Beatlemania,’ that was just starting then. But that didn’t interest either of us at all. We went to Ronnie Scott’s in the evening, to the old Ronnie Scott’s on Gerrard Street, where I got to know all the English musicians. I was there all the time, almost every night; it was practically my living room. I saw Tubby Hayes, Phil Seamen, Joe Harriott, all the English musicians, a different band every night. I was making five pounds a week. That was sixty francs back then. I don’t remember how much it cost to get in, but I was there almost every night.”

She washed glasses behind the bar sometimes, too. When the club found out that she played piano, a bassist took care of her, Schweizer says. “He let me play in another, smaller club on Swallow Street, where piano trios played. When a musician was taking a break, I was allowed to step in and play one or two songs, sometimes on drums. They paid a lot of attention to me and encouraged me. In London, I moved around very freely. I was never afraid, even if I had to walk home late at night from Ronnie Scott’s in the West End. And nothing ever happened to me. Besides the music scene, I was also interested in English and French cinema. It was the time of Free Cinema and the Nouvelle Vague. I went to the movies all the time; I saw Godard’s films, and also the first films of Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta. I was fascinated by these films, because they were so different from ‘ordinary’ cinema. A new world of emotions opened up for me.” (In: Nigg, pp. 56–66).

In Evan Parker’s view, Irène Schweizer studied “the jazz life” in London and finally decided to become a musician: “Irène knew all the generation of English modern jazz players, that were also my heroes. And she was a little bit closer to them in the sense that she was at Ronnie’s every night, whereas I had to save up and go occasionally to those kinds of places. So, we have that connection with her history in London; I know what Irène is talking about. She came from the same place as she did the same listening. Like I said, she was at Ronnie Scott’s. People position themselves in those early years, late teens to early 20s. If you look at what all of those individuals did, you’ll find that they gravitated to be in the right place. Alex von Schlippenbach and Manfred Schoof lived in Paris, sleeping on the floor, playing for nothing, just opening up sets for well-known bands. And Peter Kowald, what was Kowald doing? He was drifting all over Europe looking for people. He came to London, he tracked down John Stevens. The first time I met Peter Brötzmann was when he came to London. And, everybody had that approach. Or, I’m sure when you look at the history of all those individuals, you’ll find that in that crucial period where they were just forming a sense of what might be possible. What from their own abilities, and what response would they get from the scene or the community? I think Irène came here to learn English, but what she really wanted was to play jazz and listen to jazz and see how the jazz musicians behaved, how did they talk to one another, what kind of opinions did they hold? You learn how to integrate yourself into a community. And Irène’s trip to London has to be seen in that context, and then there’s a period where you don’t know what happens next.”

Secretary: Inner Security

“My mother paid for my education, the boarding school, the language school in London, and the business school in Zürich that I attended in between the boarding school in Lucens—Institut protestant des jeunes filles—and England. After that, I worked as a secretary and I lived off that money. I was able to write shorthand in three languages, and I could type and do transcripts. I did nine-to-five jobs for various American companies. In Zürich I played music, rehearsed with musicians, and also earned a little money from music. But my main income was as a secretary. In Zürich, I had a furnished room very close to the Africana in Sumatra Street, five minutes from Niederdorf, where the Africana was.”

Her younger sister Margrit says that Irène later left her job as a secretary and only played the piano. “Those were difficult years in the beginning, having to get by without a job, without any additional income. That was certainly hard, but she made it. We used to think that Lotte was the talented one. But in London, Irène was the one who got her act together.”

“Compared to London, Zürich is a small town,” says Schweizer. “Zürich is so bourgeois and provincial, and London was my first real big city, it was incredibly fascinating. And I loved the language too. London was actually the most beautiful time of my life—but I didn’t want to move there, and in Zürich I made contact with all the good musicians who lived and played here. Then I started playing a lot in Switzerland, with Pierre Favre and all kinds of people. I’ve always lived better here, part-time jobs were pretty easy to find in Zürich. I couldn’t have done that in England.”

International Amateur Jazz Festival in Zürich: Amateur Was an Attitude

The amateur status of jazz musicians is a Swiss peculiarity. “Amateur” refers to those musicians who play their own music, without making compromises. They earn their living in other ways. By contrast, a musician who is considered “professional” typically has a position in a symphony orchestra. Schweizer describes the Swiss amateur jazz festival as “unique in the world—it existed already in the mid-1950s. All the musicians who took part had some other way to make money, which means that they played jazz but didn’t make a living from it. The musical standard among many of these musicians was insanely high. André Berner was the organizer of these amateur jazz festivals in Zürich. He was an important figure. Hans Kennel, Franco Ambrosetti, Bruno Spoerri, they all played the festival. They were all amateurs back then; they had a career or they were students. There were also people who came from very rich backgrounds, like Alex Bally—his uncle was the shoe company Bally—and Ambrosetti, who had a factory in Ticino. Ambrosetti and Kennel were amateur musicians because they didn’t play jazz as a profession, but they played everywhere. I don’t know how they managed to do all that—work, family, jazz. I was also an amateur musician at the time, but of course I wanted to stay a musician. Franco took over his father’s factory, so did Hans Kennel. Bruno Spoerri was a psychologist, he had a family and he knew that he couldn’t make a living from music. But it wasn’t like that for me; I didn’t want a family, I wanted to become a musician and stay one, and to be able to make a living from it. It took me a long time to get to the point where I could just play music. Then there were also the musicians who played commercial music. Hazy Osterwald played a lot of jazz in the beginning, he was a good trumpet player, but then the band got more and more commercial, a show band. He made really good money, but the music got worse and worse; it was really bad. ‘Amateur’ was an attitude, you preferred to work a job to earn money. You made music out of passion, that’s how it was with us. Most of the people who did that had jobs where they made good money and didn’t have to get too involved in the work. But then they could make the music they wanted to play, without prostituting themselves. That’s how it was with most musicians in Switzerland back then.”

Saxophonist Bruno Spoerri is six years older than Schweizer: “That was a big age difference, of course, I was almost a father figure. When I met her, I was already married, and soon I had children, so I was in a completely different place. In some way, I came from the jazz tradition. I came to Zürich in 1962, after having lived in Basel and Biel. Because I had won first prize at the first Amateur Jazz Festival in 1954, I was practically part of the establishment. That was the relatively traditional Metronome Quintet, which later played light jazz and jazzy pop songs. I quit because I wanted to play more modern stuff.”

From the Jazz Cousins to the First Irène Schweizer Trio (1962–1964): The Beginnings

In 1962 the Schaffhausen newspaper wrote: “The new Irène Schweizer Trio with bassist Urs Rohr and drummer Herbert Velder performed with great success in the preliminary round of the Jazz Festival on August 25, 1962, at the City Casino Winterthur.” The new trio, which mainly played soul jazz, emerged from the hard bop quintet The Jazz Cousins, which included Schweizer, Rohr, and Velder, as well as cornetist Jürg Grau and saxophonist Alex Rohr. Her appearance with the Jazz Cousins “earned Irène Schweizer the winner’s pennant, donated by the company Sinalco.” (SN, September 3, 1962). Under the headline “Irène Schweizer: First Lady of Jazz,” the Schaffhausen paper reported on the second International Amateur Jazz Festival in Zürich, where Schweizer was the only female participant. Selections played by the Jazz Cousins included ‘Miguel’s Party,’ ‘Oleo,’ ‘Close Your Eyes,’ and the Horace Silver compositions ‘Sister Sadie,’ ‘Sayonara Blues,’ and ‘Tokyo Blues.’

The trio opened with the Junior Mance piece ‘Jubilation,’ a well-known ‘hard bop’ theme in which the improvisations were perhaps a little too long. The second piece, an old Negro spiritual, revealed a strong basis in the ‘soul style,’ as the new piano style rooted in the blues is called. The jury noted with great attention the technical progress made by Irène Schweizer, who demonstrated pleasing block chords. The Irène Schweizer Trio’s fourth place award, announced later, can be regarded as a high honor (SN, October 5, 1962).

The recording of ‘Jubilation’ was released the following year on LP.

Since Schweizer did not return from her stay in England until the beginning of September 1963, her trio had to perform outside the competition at the Third International Amateur Jazz Festival, held at Zürich’s Cinema Urban. In November, she worked as a secretary at the Zürich branch of the US financial group Brunswick Inc., on the Limmatquai.

First Concerts with Uli Trepte and Mani Neumeier

In December 1963, Schweizer played a three-day engagement at the Schaffhausen Cinema Scala, in a 50-minute program accompanying the jazz film All Night Long. In addition to saxophonist Alex Rohr, bassist Uli Trepte and drummer Mani Neumeier were part of the group. “Since the general public unfortunately showed little interest in this event, this kind of thing will probably not often be heard again.” (SN, December 21, 1963).

January 4, 1964 saw the launch of a new Swiss television series, Jazz Made in Switzerland, with the aim of introducing young and well-known amateur jazz musicians to a wider public. The first broadcast featured the Irène Schweizer Trio (SN, January 18, 1964). “The funny thing was,” says Schweizer, “that this trio was not really a Swiss trio. Uli Trepte and Mani Neumeier lived in Switzerland, but were actually Germans. Uli was from Constance and Mani was from Munich. They also had this uncompromising, searching, open-minded attitude. We met at the Africana jazz club and we knew right away that it was a good fit.”

Irène Schweizer Trio with Uli Trepte and Mani Neumeier (1964–1967): Suddenly Free

In 1964, at the 14th International Amateur Jazz Festival in Zürich, Schweizer took first place as a soloist and second place for the Trio. Radio and television recordings followed, and in August 1965 the Irène Schweizer Trio played with great success at the jazz club in Prague. At the 1965 International Jazz Festival in Vienna, the Trio was honored as the best visiting group.

Mani Neumeier remembers that the trio was initially rejected: “We were still playing in Schaffhausen in 1963, against a headwind, because the press said it wasn’t music. Prague, on the other hand, was a great experience. It wasn’t easy to get there; you needed certain permits. But once we were there we were totally respected by the audience and treated like gods. People brought us gifts. They were still half into Dixieland and swing and they were totally enthusiastic about what we were doing.”

As Peter Bürli reports, Schweizer made radio recordings as early as the mid-1960s: “She played a bit more freely with her trio, but it was still clearly in the jazz tradition. I noticed that she always had these wave movements. I listened to her recordings in our archive going back in reverse chronological order, and that helped me understand where she stands today. If she’s coming back to her beginnings now, it’s not a reactionary movement, those are her roots. Simple and moving, that’s where she’s at home.”

Africana: Still No Avant-Garde

On the origin of her trio, Schweizer says that she met Uli Trepte and Mani Neumeier in the Africana, at Mühlegasse 17:

“At that time Mani was playing Ramsey Lewis pieces in a trio, and Uli was always hanging out at the Africana. Down in the basement there was a storage room that had been converted into a rehearsal room with a small piano. It wasn’t open to the public. The musicians who were playing upstairs in the café could rehearse downstairs in the afternoon. That’s where we got together. Remo Rau organized the concert program, and suddenly we were the trio. We rehearsed like crazy. Bill Evans and Paul Bley were my role models, and slowly we developed towards free playing, we stopped playing compositions, instead we went more and more to free passages, including playing without a regular pulse and functional harmony. We bought the first LP by Paul Bley, Footloose with Pete LaRoca on drums, and we were totally thrilled. Then came Coltrane with McCoy Tyner, and we copied all the tracks from the first Coltrane quartet records. That was exhausting, we had to rehearse a lot and there was no sheet music, we had to learn everything by ear. The songs, the harmonies, we learned everything from the records. The Africana hasn’t been around for a long time, now it’s the Hotel Scheuble. When jazz didn’t work financially any more, they booked English rock bands and ‘beat’ musicians, and at the end of the 1960s the café closed.”

“When Irène Schweizer first appeared on the Zürich jazz scene, it was a kind of religious war. It took place in the Africana, a somewhat dingy, dark cave between the university and the ETH on the one hand, and Malatesta and the Fantasio-Bar on the other, Switzerland’s most important jazz center at the time and one of the most exciting in Europe.” (Tages-Anzeiger, November 9, 1991).

Bruno Spoerri, after leaving the Metronom Quintet in 1962, was soon playing with Remo Rau, Hans Kennel, and Alex Bally in the Africana house band. “From Irène’s point of view, when she first arrived on the scene we were already established. She also comes from the tradition,” says Spoerri. “I have a recording of her from the jazz festival in 1958 that I rescued from the radio studio. She wasn’t fully developed yet, playing with a group from Schaffhausen and a wooden drummer who couldn’t swing at all. She was by far the best of the group and already had a good, percussive touch. In the Africana she was part of the crowd who, for one thing, were Dollar Brand fanatics, who followed Dollar Brand, and they also revered Remo Rau, who was the father figure there. But the young musicians saw themselves as rebelling against the establishment, meaning us. Later, in the Wuppertal Kaputtspielphase (‘broken playing phase’), I of course was involved on the other side. Although we were actually also kind of free when we played compositions by Gary Burton or Michael Gibbs. In 1965 I became a professional musician; I worked for a film company and wrote music for commercials. So again, I was on the other side from them, back then. From Irène’s point of view, I was the establishment and she was the rebel. That was very important in 1968. I was one of the people earning a lot of money, who could support a family, while she really had to fight for her income.”

“In the Africana, the musicians got one franc for every drink sold. At most you’d go home with 20 francs. The professional musicians were extremely poorly paid, too. Even Dollar Brand, who lived in Zürich then and played at the Africana, had a lot of trouble making a living from music.”

“Remo Rau was my jazz father in Zürich,” says Schweizer. “He always gave me the chord changes when I wanted to play a piece and couldn’t find the chords. I sometimes found Horace Silver to be quite difficult harmonically, and then he’d hear the chord progressions and write down the notes for me. He was very good at it. He wasn’t a brilliant pianist, but he was a good teacher. He taught me a lot. After the rehearsals at the Africana we went to eat at the Eckstein. That was a pub where all the musicians met. We’d talk a lot with each other about who was playing what, where, with whom. On those occasions I’d sometimes ask him if he could please figure out the changes of this or that piece for me. And the Predigerhof was the pub where you could buy some alcohol, because the Africana didn’t sell alcoholic drinks.”

“Remo Rau was a little older than us,” says Bruno Spoerri. “He played Dixieland and was a good clarinetist at first. Then he had to stop because he got tuberculosis, and he switched to the piano. In the beginning, the Africana was a small, badly run café where a few amateur musicians played, until Remo came and took over the musical direction. He convinced the boss, who didn’t care about jazz, and starting playing two evenings a week with his own groups. He was the driving force; he invited other groups, encouraged a lot of people, and he helped everyone who asked. He passed on music and ideas; he was really a core figure in the Africana. Musically, Dollar Brand then became even more important.”

Africana flyer, October 1964

Dollar Brand: Hymnic Fascination

For the Modern Jazz Preachers, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers were still the model. When Schweizer played in Africana with the new Irène Schweizer Trio, it was a step in a new direction. She remembers: “Eighty to a hundred people fit into the Africana. It was a non-alcoholic café. We amateur musicians always played the earlier set, from seven to nine, and then either the solo pianist Champion Jack Dupree or Joe Turner or the trio with Dollar Brand played. That lasted until eleven-thirty or twelve, because closing time was half past midnight. Brand’s trio with bassist Johnny Gertze and drummer Makaya Ntshoko played for almost two years starting in 1962, mainly in the Africana, and that’s where Duke Ellington discovered him and produced the album Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio in Paris in 1963. I was really fascinated by Dollar. I had never heard of Africans playing jazz before, and Dollar was from Cape Town. His role model was Monk. He really played like Monk, including in the trio. He lived in exile in Zürich with Sathima Bea Benjamin, later his wife.”

“The music in the Africana had nothing to do with the avant-garde, even though what Dollar played sounded close to it to me. I talked with him many times, and often with Makaya too. In the Africana I listened to Dollar Brand, and the great thing for me was to follow the interaction in the trio. Dollar set the direction, he played the themes and the others accompanied. Johnny Gertze was a true accompanist on the bass; he hardly ever played a solo, and Makaya also seldom played solos. It was a strong trio; it really touched me. Dollar Brand played so hymnically and also very calmly, it was really a balm for my soul.”

The best South African musicians, including singer Miriam Makeba, Dollar Brand, and trumpeter Hugh Masekela, came to London during a tour of the South African musical King Kong in 1961, shortly after the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa. The musical tells the story of the South African boxer Ezekiel “King Kong” Dlamini, in the form of an “African jazz opera.” In London, the 72 musicians played the piece 201 times. Many of them decided afterwards not to return to their home country, with its violence and apartheid, and lived in London, in some cases in poverty and even homelessness. Miriam Makeba went to New York; Dollar Brand went to Zürich and later also to New York. They were not able to return to South Africa until 1994, after the release of Nelson Mandela, his election as president, and the end of apartheid.

“A friend of mine, the graphic artist Paul Meier, had discovered Dollar Brand and Miriam Makeba in South Africa,” says Bruno Spoerri. “He invited them to his home, almost at the risk of their and his lives, and after his return to Switzerland, he arranged for Dollar Brand and Chris McGregor to come to Switzerland and tried to help them get established there. Dollar Brand played at first with a terrible reggae band. That was where Hans Kennel discovered him and convinced him to come to the Africana. I was probably the first one who played with Dollar at that time. Then everything happened very fast, and soon Duke Ellington heard him in the Africana and invited him to Paris for Dollar’s first recording. Ellington performed one evening in Zürich, and Sathima persuaded him to come to the Africana. Dollar Brand got us, and especially Irène, away from the Art Blakey groove, which had become very sterile by then and was starting to actually get on our nerves. A kind of love-hate relationship developed between Remo and Dollar. Remo loved Dollar, but sometimes he also made fun of him because he went off the rails so easily. Dollar could quickly become aggressive and occasionally would play really badly. Dollar had discovered alcohol, which had devastating effects on him. In the Africana they didn’t serve alcohol, but you could drink in the pub across the street.”

“Dollar Brand and the Blue Notes, a group of South African musicians who came to live in exile in Zürich, showed us how good music works,” Mani Neumeier sums up. “When I see Dollar Brand now, we remember each other, but we weren’t friends. The drummers played differently; I learned something from that.”

“I also thought Irène was still playing fresher than Dollar Brand in the 1970s and 1980s, that she actually played better than him,” recalls Rüdiger Carl. “Sometimes his playing was so weighed down with melancholy, but she was able to bring a freshness to it. I heard that again recently, on this CD with South African pieces by Randy Weston and Johnny Dyani—the way she approaches it is really good. That’s exactly what she brought to it. When we started playing together, sometimes we were done with it, you warmed up, went on stage, and she had already been sitting at the piano for 45 minutes, playing this South African stuff. I was fed up with it. So I said to her, what am I supposed to do now, if we have to start right away? She could do that; that was her thing. She used it to warm up. She soaked that music up in the 1960s; she was always at the Africana and Dollar Brand was constantly working there. She heard all that, and she made friends with the South Africans right away.”

Blue Notes: This Band Was Made in Heaven

In 1964, the Blue Notes came to Zürich to live in exile. They were a young South African jazz group with Chris McGregor, piano, Mongezi Feza, trumpet, Johnny Dyani, bass, Dudu Pukwana, alto saxophone, Nikele Moyake, tenor saxophone, and Louis Moholo on drums. “And they played from nine to eleven, sometimes we played before them in a quartet with Alex Rohr,” says Schweizer. “Louis Moholo still tells me today that he always listened to us, and that I was playing like McCoy Tyner back then. That’s not true at all, but I was very impressed. The Blue Notes were so wild, the shows were like a circus; they were insanely wild and drunk every night. They were always in the pub next door, where you could get beer. It was a shock for me to hear this music; I had no idea about African jazz. They were so young, all just about twenty. But Chris McGregor had already mastered everything. He was the white man, and they had great respect for him.”

“I talked a lot with Mongezi Feza, Johnny Dyani, and Louis Moholo, and sometimes they came to our rehearsals in the basement or we’d listen to them rehearse their pieces downstairs. Of course, they were all constantly trying to pick up women. Mongezi always said: ‘Irène, I love you, I love you,’ you know, all the lines. Everyone wanted to go to bed with me; everyone was in love with me the whole time. It was crazy. And the language, the way they spoke back then. I had never heard African English before; in my time in England I’d only learned ‘good old English,’ and that was an amazing experience for me.”

Louis Moholo remembers how he met Schweizer: “I met Irène at the Africana in the 1960s. Fantastic player, good technique, big heart. We were surprised about the music, because the music was like Coltrane kind-of-influenced. And I was surprised, because we thought we were past that. I thought it was music of the past, and I was surprised that they were playing this music. We used to play for about maybe two hours at the set, and when we came over here, man, it was like 45 minutes. It was so hard. We were stopped at the Africana playing, actually. We didn’t know the situation, so were told ‘No, no, no. You cut it down and play for about 45 minutes.’ Irène, man, is good today as well. Yeah, very nice girl, we were impressed. We loved her. The band was very good, with men like Dudu Pukwana and Mongezi Feza, the greatest trumpet player, man, ever. Johnny Dyani was a big bass player. And it was cold. The weather messed us up in Zürich. But we were lucky as well. Makaya and Dollar Brand and Johnny Gertze came before us. They made the road for us easy. It was easy to kind of like be accepted, as it was expected for us to be in the high level, because they were in the high level. So we did give them the satisfaction of that high level music because this band was made in heaven. I would say this. So unlucky that they all died, it’s like I have been fired from the band and I think maybe they’re having a big, big show in heaven.”

“The Blue Notes were a young, wild group,” Bruno Spoerri says. “Of course, they went after every woman who was around there. Moholo and Dudu especially. In Zürich they lived under terrible conditions, they had a hard time. But on the other hand they really brought life to this city. There was a lot going on around them. Irène was very serious and stayed away from alcohol, but they were all trying to get somewhere with her.”

“The Blue Notes were a lively bunch of guys. We already knew them before they got their provisional visas for Great Britain, through whatever tricks they used,” says Peter Brötzmann. “Makaya, the former drummer of Dollar Brand, still lives in Switzerland today. They were different from the Americans we knew, and they were different from us. They were a spirited bunch, and when they came together around Chris McGregor in London later on, it was a great band, playing like hell, it was really good.”

“The Blue Notes made exactly the music Irène was interested in, this crazy jazz,” reports Isolde Schaad. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have had anything to do with them, but this was the music she was excited about from childhood on. She wanted to do that herself, and these African musicians were the ones playing it.”

Louis Moholo remembers the immense pressure to leave South Africa: “In South Africa, it was very hard for us to apply for a visa, for a passport in the first place. I was very much involved in politics in South Africa, and very active in the young movement in the ANC, and we were marked. I was one of the people marked, so I had to change my name to Christian and my age, actually, since I was born in 1940. I changed my name into my father’s name. My father was cool. He was not in trouble. I was shocked that I got a visa actually. I got a passport. I was shocked. In my passport, my name is Christian Moholo Moholo Moholo. There were some white Liberals in South Africa, who gave us money for a visa. McGregor was involved with these people. I mean, like, some of us were arrested for playing with the white people. These were the heavy years, heavy menace in South Africa then. I mean, I remember I was playing in Cape Town where my mother wouldn’t even dare come in there, man. And I played behind the curtain, while white men were pretending to play on stage. So this was the heavy menace in South Africa. We had to leave South Africa. First of all, to preserve the music so that we could come back and plant it back. We planted the music back. That was fortunate, because Chris McGregor did compose, all of us did, and the music now is being sorted out in South Africa. The people in South Africa now are gaining and experiencing the music that we built in Europe. So we had to go out of South Africa, because of the situation. It was a heavy menace, man. They shot to kill in South Africa. I landed in France, then in Zürich—in the Africana Jazz Club. Usually, for a year, until we were advised to go out of Zürich because of some problems. Like we like girls. But Switzerland was a Catholic kind of like situation. So like they didn’t allow us to have girls that we can talk with. We loved the country. It’s just that there were some problems. And we wanted to progress.”

Evan Parker met the Blue Notes later in London. “The Blue Notes went to Zürich and stayed there for a year, and then they came to London and pretty much were based in London until things started to break up gradually. They were all living in one big house to begin with, and then I think Dudu got married to Barbara, a Swiss lady. And so, there were all these strange connections between Zürich and South Africa and London, which played out differently according to which individual’s life you follow.”

Schweizer frequently visited the Blue Notes after they moved to London. “I was in London pretty often, and I had a very close relationship with Hazel and Harry Miller, who often put me up there. And when I visited Harry and Hazel, I always met with Chris McGregor. He sometimes showed me a few chords of some Monk tunes. Sometimes I traveled with his Brotherhood of Breath, just went along with them to hear the music, just as a fan. Harry wasn’t in the Blue Notes; I met him in England in the Chris McGregor Big Band. Harry Miller was there and so was Louis Moholo. I always felt homesick for London because, as I’ve said, it was the best and most beautiful time of my life, those two years in England. It was so great, there were these great musicians there and I could hear music everywhere. For me, as a young woman, it was a huge revelation, after Schaffhausen and Zürich. I took holidays in London often, and Harry always invited me to play. I also rehearsed a lot with John Stevens, and played all over.”

Hazel Miller, the widow of Cape Town-born bassist Harry Miller, who died in a car accident in 1983 at the age of 42, says that Schweizer brought the group that followed the Blue Notes, Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, to Willisau in Switzerland. “We met Irène there, and she and Harry always played together. When I was living in South London, I organized the New Music Society together with Jackie Tracey, and we invited Irène to our weekly jazz club, Grassroots. We became friends, and I spent some holidays with her in Switzerland. To this day she is in contact with Louis; they have a very nice duo together. Like many European musicians, Irène fell in love with South African music and the remarkable energy and creativity of the musicians, who have a completely different cultural background. I haven’t seen her for a long time, but in the 1970s we saw each other often. Harry and I had an apartment in Stockwell, and a lot of musicians visited us there. That was 53 years ago; my daughter was just three years old. It went on like that for 18 months, but then the owner of the pub took off with the money. We organized summer schools and record labels like Ogun, and started a family. I had met Harry before the Blue Notes came along. There is a strong South African community in London, and Irène was very inspired by that. There were only a few women musicians at the time. A lot was going on. We were lonely musicians who didn’t get any recognition. We were young, breaking boundaries. A new music was born and Irène was part of it. People talked about it, Melody Maker wrote about it, there was good press for this new music. There were struggles and media actions, trying to get better pay and more recognition for jazz musicians. It wasn’t a political movement, the musicians’ commitment didn’t go that far. But in their work, they were questioning the politics of their time. [Trombonist] Paul Rutherford was a communist. The photographer and journalist Valerie Wilmer loved the music, she took beautiful photos of the Blue Notes. She was very supportive. We had to start Ogun because the Brotherhood needed a label. The first record sold 13,000 copies. That got us some attention. The second one didn’t do as well. Now it’s been 40 years, and we have a big archive.”

In conversation at Hazel Miller’s London home, Louis Moholo also looks back with nostalgia at the early years in London: “In the 1960s, London was a mecca for music, man. It was all happening here. So we had to be here. We had to be here to improve ourselves, and Irène followed us. Actually, she fell in love with us as we fell in love with her musically. Musically it was all happening here. They opened their hearts for us. And the relationship was so close that she couldn’t stay without us, and we couldn’t stay without her. So we invited her to come over, and I knew that I was going to play with her as we do it even today. She came and stayed with us at Chris McGregor’s place. I was living with Chris McGregor, then she came and stayed with us and we hung out in England. We did the same thing that boys and girls would do because we were young. You must remember that. I was in my 20s then, man. So we were jumping about, and London was jumping. It was the Flower Power, the revolutionary years. So like we were there at the right time, the Sixties were the right time. An apartment in Warwick Avenue, we stayed there. We used it as a meeting place, as a practice room, we did everything in there. We were very young and we missed our parents as well. We missed our mothers and fathers, kind of like soothe the hearts when we came to London because of the big heart the Londoners had for us. They opened up their arms to welcome us. So we felt at home with the language, and there was the ANC as well. So we felt at home in England, more than maybe in Zürich. Irène would come just for maybe two or three days and we’d meet on the continent. Anyway, we’d meet in Germany and Belgium, everywhere. I was the only one living with Chris. Everybody else was married, you see. Like Dudu got married and then, I think Mongezi went to Copenhagen and got married, and Johnny got married. So they all went. I was the last one to marry, I married very late in my life, at 32 years old. But the other guys married when they were 20. I mean, Chris McGregor, too, married when he was in his 20s. Twenty years or more we had this huge apartment, and then he went to Hastings to live out of London. Chris and Maxine. And then the daughter came. It’s just a lot of room. Lots of guests would come through. We just wanted to visit, because we were talking the same language, which was jazz.”

Going Pro, 1965/1966: Highway to Wuppertal

Mani Neumeier said of the trio’s development from amateur to professional status: “Before we became professionals, we heard Coltrane with Elvin Jones live in Zürich. Irène started drumming the beats on my knees with her hands and told me: ‘Mani, sometimes you’re so good and sometimes it’s just not there, it’s exasperating!’ But then in 1965 I put in the work, and after that I could do whatever was needed. Irène wanted to get me to put more Elvin Jones into my playing. We worked on listening to it together, figuring it out. We were happy to do the driving and the rehearsals, because we were getting somewhere. And we talked about music. Uli was important there as the intellectual. We talked about our role models, Coltrane, Ornette, Cecil—how we could make our music freer. Eighty percent of it happened in rehearsals.”

On becoming a professional musician, Schweizer tells the following anecdote about an English manager who appeared one evening at the Africana:

“He asked us if we didn’t feel like coming to London. He said he could get us a three-month engagement. Of course we were excited about the offer and we accepted it. But we asked him to give us enough time to give notice at our jobs. After that, weeks went by without us hearing anything from our ‘manager.’ We sent telegrams and kept getting vaguely put off. He had made our mouths water, so to speak, and now we were determined to give up our day jobs and only do jazz. So we left in January 1966, without any firm commitments. It was pretty daring. First, we went to Frankfurt, where we registered ourselves with a well-known agency and got addresses of jazz clubs and radio people. Then we went to Belgium, where we played in a jazz club for a few days and made recordings for Flemish radio. After that we crossed the English Channel to pay a visit to our ‘manager.’ We found out that this guy had simply been bluffing. We managed to get an engagement in London, playing in a small theater after the modern plays they put on, but it paid very, very little. Our next stop was Amsterdam, and there it didn’t go well: there were no clubs, we didn’t know anybody, we were running out of money, and the weather was miserable. At that point we were close to throwing in the towel and returning to Switzerland with our tails between our legs. But then we found the manager Dieter Fränzel in Wuppertal, who connected us with clubs all over Germany, from Stuttgart to Berlin. And we, and our music, were well received everywhere, even in Munich, which was conservative. We also made radio recordings in Stuttgart and Bremen.” (Wir Brückenbauer, March 3, 1967).

Looking back now on that first tour, Schweizer adds: “We had collected a lot of addresses in Belgium and Holland, places where we knew there were musicians who played like us. Mani was still working—he was a plumber—and Uli was a bookseller, he worked in a bookshop. And I was working off and on as a secretary. When I needed a job, I’d work a lot for a few months and then I’d quit. You could do that in the 1960s when the economy was booming. You could open the newspaper and take your pick, this company or that company, it was no problem finding jobs. If I worked for a few months I’d have enough money. We all worked only half a day, or not at all. And then, sometime in the fall, we said: ‘now we’re going to take a month off and just drive all over.’ First, we went to Germany and talked to the agency Lippmann und Rau in Frankfurt, but unfortunately that didn’t work out—Fritz Rau was organizing the Frankfurt Jazz Festival at the time. Then we went to Belgium, Holland, and England. We traveled for a whole month. We’d get a hotel room somewhere or stay at people’s homes. We knew musicians all over and we played everywhere. In Belgium there was a radio editor who really helped us. He said: ‘Come to the office tomorrow, I’ll see what I can do.’ We went to see him at the radio station and he had already put together a little tour for us. We’d go anywhere, any town where there was a club or a café where we could play. And we did that for a month, we even went to London and had an audition at Ronnie Scott’s, but he didn’t want the trio.”

Mani Neumeier calls it a stroke of luck that Schweizer chose Trepte and him for her new trio. “It wasn’t free music yet; we were still imitating Coltrane, Miles, and Monk, who we all saw in concerts together. It was a great experience to see all the masters live. That was my school. I would call Irène my teacher at the time; she catapulted us up a few levels. But I didn’t develop into a free player by copying models like Milford Graves or Sunny Murray. I got it from a broken water pipe. We were in a good mood, had smoked a little, were about to go to sleep, and suddenly I heard the sound of water shooting out of a broken pipe. When I heard it, I knew I wanted to play just like that. I immediately went down to the practice room and tried to play that sound, and when I had it, I woke Irène up and played it for her. After that, we broke through the barrier of traditional rhythm. We must have been in Brussels at the time, and it was a good match.”

“I was the only one who could drive, so of course I did. My Peugeot station wagon was packed full; Irène sat next to me in the front, the double bass was stuck in the car diagonally, and Uli sat almost right under it. The bass drum was on the roof. It was fun, and sometimes exhausting. For two years we’d worked as an amateur band. We’d already performed in Vienna and Prague, and people were amazed that music like that was even possible. It went so well that at the end of 1965 we all said, ‘we’re quitting our jobs.’ We went to Brussels, where we had a two-week engagement, and we went to London and other cities. We went all over and got to know all the other musicians, like Brötzmann, Schlippenbach, and Schoof. They accepted us immediately because they saw that we could play. We joined the club. Irène was the only woman and we were the only Swiss musicians. Then we went from Wuppertal to Berlin and Cologne and Munich—wherever there was a chance to play. It was just great that we could play and had audiences. We didn’t find that tiring back then.”

“We did everything for the sake of the music. We wanted to play, and we knew we had to drive and find places where we could play. It was stressful,” adds Schweizer. “Of course there was much less traffic back then and you could easily take the autobahn to Wuppertal, something I’d never do now.”

“I rode a Lambretta scooter for a long time. I didn’t get my license to drive a car until 1968. Early on I rarely needed glasses when I drove, just for long-distance,” Schweizer says. “Sometimes I wore glasses while playing and sometimes I didn’t. At that time you didn’t wear trousers, women wore dresses or skirts.” Starting at the end of the 1960s, Mani Neumeier began dressing very colorfully, in Thai silk jackets, with long hair. “But in the beginning we dressed conservatively,” he says. “Pleated skirt—the stage outfits came later, and wearing black even later than that. You had to stand out. We had no sponsors, no manager; you had to do it all through the music in such a way that something would stick, musically and visually.”

Avant-Garde 1966: The Carla Bley Factor

At the beginning of October 1966, a “Week of New Jazz Music” took place in Bremen, where the Paul Bley Trio, the Mike Mantler / Carla Bley Quintet, Peter Brötzmann, the Irène Schweizer Trio, and other avant-garde musicians were presented.

40 years later, John Corbett, journalist, record label head, and festival organizer from Chicago, describes his discovery of recordings from that time: “I did a project just as the record label was starting, where I went to German radio stations. I had heard that people were beginning to discard tapes for space reasons. So I did a project where I went around and basically looked at what their holdings were, and I found a session of hers. It was a big session with three groups that played as groups and then played in mixed and matched settings with one another. So it’s the Schweizer trio, Brötzmann quartet, and the Schlippenbach group. And they played in all different kinds of configurations. It was maybe ’66 or ’67. Very, very wonderful music, very interesting. It was a trio with Schlippenbach, Schweizer, and Fred Van Hove, and so all of these different kinds of combinations. And it was a revelation; I mean, listening to this thing was totally fantastic, totally. I mean, the music isn’t all great because it’s ad hoc and it made me realize how incredibly, just how top-of-the-heap she was from very early on, and that she was really one of the greatest improvisers ever.”

Peter Brötzmann and Peter Kowald met Irène Schweizer in Switzerland in the mid-1960s. “She was on the road with a trio, with Mani Neumeier and Uli Trepte, which we liked very much,” says Brötzmann. “We invited them to Wuppertal. I was also playing with Neumeier for a while, and then some opportunities came up for us to all get together, for example at Radio Bremen. I think we were the first to get Irène out of Switzerland. And through her we got to know Pierre Favre, an important drummer at that time. So it was quite a fruitful exchange, and at that time our South African friends the Blue Notes were still in Switzerland, and all that came together quite well. I played mostly with [Belgian pianist] Fred Van Hove, but Irène was always my favorite pianist, and actually she still is. Her connection with Han Bennink has also lasted for decades.”

Frankfurt 1966: Technically Incompetent Charlatans

In 1966, Schweizer’s trio was invited to the Frankfurt Jazz Festival as a young group on their way up. She says: “Brötzmann and Kowald set it up, and they also played there. And for the first time we got some criticism: we were described as charlatans, the Wuppertalers and us. At that time, we played a mixture of pieces and free improvisations, but it was still pretty harmless, I think. Maybe I’d been influenced by listening to LPs with Trepte; we often listened to contemporary classical music.”

The German newspaper Die Zeit reported on the 10th German Jazz Festival in Frankfurt, May 6, 1966:

At the Frankfurt Festival, on the other hand, fun was frowned upon. The lady wore a black dress and the gentleman sported a beard, and both wore serious faces: signifiers of the seriousness of the avant-garde. They are exponents of so-called ‘free jazz,’ in which everyone plays so fast, so wild, so loudly, and so unconventionally that they can do anything they like, as long as it doesn’t hint at a theme or a pulse. In truth, the generic term ‘free jazz’ is misleading. Even the ‘freest’ jazz to date is not entirely free. Even if it is inaccurate, the comparison suggests itself: looking for a ‘theme’ in electronic music would be a pointless effort. Similarly, in free jazz one listens for structures, sound complexes that are planned extremely precisely, waves of crescendo, changes of direction, sound montages, instrumental combinations. Titles borrowing terms from physics or architecture, such as ‘modulus’ or ‘intensity,’ point to some of these musical goals. There are parallels with concert music: for example, Edgard Varèse named a composition for flute after the density of platinum, ‘Density 21.5.’ Connoisseurs have gained an understanding of these freedoms as a new medium that the listener is able to follow in the music of the Gunter Hampel Quartet or the Manfred Schoof Ensemble, or exemplified even better by the Americans: the Don Cherry Quintet and the Charles Lloyd Quartet. In their music the listener can hear formal features and recognize structures, and even find thematic material. On the other hand, the music presented by some others, such as the Peter Brötzmann Trio, the Irène Schweizer Trio, or Wolfgang Dauner and his trio, fluctuated between technical incompetence and charlatanism. And charlatanism was heard too often at the Frankfurt Festival.

Cecil Taylor 1966: pure energy

“To me the piano itself is an orchestra”
– Cecil Taylor

In 1966, the Cecil Taylor Quartet, with Jimmy Lyons, Alan Silva, and Andrew Cyrille, played at the Week of Light Music festival in the broadcast studio Villa Berg in Stuttgart. Taylor gave a concert at noon and another in the afternoon. In the 25-minute piece ‘Second Amplitude: Words,’ he played prepared piano, and the version of ‘Conquistador’ presented in the afternoon lasted 40 minutes.

Schweizer, 24 years old at the time, traveled to Stuttgart to hear Taylor. His concert threw her into a state of shock from which it took her a long time to emerge: “When Cecil Taylor performed in Stuttgart in 1966, the three of us were there. When I heard the trio, I thought to myself, well, what am I doing now, it’s no use, forget it. I was just so impressed, and I thought, ok, I’ll never be able to do that. I fell into a crisis, I decided to stop playing for a while. I didn’t play any gigs, and it was half a year until I felt ready again. It took me a while to get over the shock, hearing Cecil totally threw me off track. Not so much the music itself, but how Taylor was on stage, his way of playing, his attacks and technique were just incredible. I didn’t understand anything at all, it was just clusters all the time, like mad. And now I’m glad not to have to hear that anymore, music that’s always up here at this intense level. After that experience, for a while I played like that all the time—power, power, energy.” Mani Neumeier was also at the Cecil Taylor concert in Stuttgart, but he says he didn’t realize the crisis it caused for Schweizer: “I would have loved to play with Cecil, I was ready for it, I had found my thing and I was getting a lot of press. I was the first drummer to play free, even Han Bennink acknowledged that to me.”

Wuppertal 1966: Rolling out the Mattresses

“After the Frankfurt Jazz Festival, it all started,” recalls Schweizer. “Dieter Fränzel, whose main job was working for the city of Wuppertal, became our manager for a while. Brötzmann stole Mani from me, because he could play pretty wild. But I think after a while Mani himself didn’t want to do it any more, it was too wild for him.” Neumeier says that Fränzel understood the music and set up gigs in the area. “We used to stay with him too. Brötzmann had a family, and we made sure that we didn’t get in the way too much; we washed dishes, cleaned up, cooked. The point was to make the tours possible, to help each other out. Sometimes there was a room with mattresses where you could sleep; sometimes everyone had their own room.”

The book Sounds like whoopataal: Wuppertal in der Welt des Jazz [Sounds like Whoopataal: Wuppertal in the World of Jazz] by E. Dieter Fränzel and published by JAZZ AG Wuppertal, reports that Schweizer’s trio first appeared at the Wuppertal club, Impuls, in April 1968. On that occasion there was also a spontaneous improvised session with Brötzmann (p. 112).

“There was no cell phone, no Internet. I wrote letters to the organizers, everything was done by mail, and sometimes by phone,” says Schweizer. “I talked to Fränzel on the phone regularly, and he got us gigs. Between Düsseldorf, Cologne, Wuppertal, and Aachen we played in clubs all over, all the time. With the trio we’d earn one hundred and fifty marks back then, if I remember correctly, and the manager also got something.”

Peter Brötzmann describes what things were like in Wuppertal, the “German center of free jazz”: “Irène’s trio lived in Wuppertal for a while. I had my family and a relatively large apartment, so they all came to us first, and the mattresses were rolled out and we made room for more mattresses. My wife, Christa, was a fantastic woman who could put dinner on the table seemingly from nothing, and there were also a few bottles of beer around. I worked in the Wicküler Brewery during the semester break and I always got a few bottles for free, so whoever came by, it worked out one way or another. And it wasn’t just musicians. I already had a lot of connections with visual artists back then, especially in England and Scotland, and when they came over of course there was a bottle or two of Scotch on the table, a piece of bread and some soup, and then we’d look around for some work. Uli Trepte stayed in Wuppertal for a few years, and so did [Swedish drummer] Sven-Åke Johansson. I met Sven-Åke with [bassist Peter] Kowald in a park in Brussels. He had his drums on his bike. We got him to come to Wuppertal, found him a place to live, and there was a little work to survive on. There was always something going on in Wuppertal. Belgium wasn’t such a bad country for music at that time; there was a very open-minded man at the radio there, and there were clubs. I also had contacts in the Netherlands very early on, you could do something there. Or you’d go to Berlin for a hundred marks and play two nights in some pub. On the Ku’damm there was the Forum Theater, a small avant-garde theater where we—that is, my trio and Irène’s Trio with Neumeier and Trepte—played our first official Berlin concert, which got some notice in the press, although not necessarily very positive.”

The Wuppertal period had later consequences, Mani Neumeier says. “At some point Rainer Blome, who co-founded the music magazine Sounds, came to me and told me I should play with Brötzmann, saying it would be higher-profile and could get me more attention. I decided in favor of Irène. A year later Irène decided to go with Kowald and Pierre. At that time we’d been together for four years, so it was time for something new. I was already on the road more with Brötzmann and Schoof, and once she had her new trio, our time was over. Later we played together again after a break of more than 20 years. The last time was about five years ago. I was seen as the bad guy because I had founded Guru-Guru and supposedly wanted to sell out, playing rock, which of course was not true at all. For a while we lived in Wuppertal. We stayed a few weeks with Brötzmann and his family. We were nomads. We usually didn’t stay in hotels—there wasn’t any money for that, so we stayed with friends and acquaintances, or musicians.”

EXCURSUS Fees, Part I: Keeping a Notebook

“In the 1970s, I wasn’t yet keeping my notebook where I wrote down my income and expenses,” says Schweizer. “But I remember that the fees were miserable back then. We had to make do with 100 to 150 German marks per person for the trio with Mani and Uli, and that was already considered a lot. An appearance with a trio for 500 marks was considered well paid. Dieter Fränzel was my agent. He consistently got us work in the clubs in Germany—we played everywhere from Karlsruhe to Hannover. When Joachim-Ernst Berendt invited me to Donaueschingen for Jazz Meets India with Mani and Uli and Barney Wilen and Manfred Schoof, I think each of us got 1000 marks, which was incredibly good money for us. Normally the gigs were always badly paid, maybe a little better in Switzerland, but in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium it was always bad. Of course we played a lot, and that was how it went. Today I only play two concerts a month, I have my set fee and I get it. In any case, I’m not going play for less than 1000 euros anymore. Besides that I have my retirement pension and a little money on the side. But back then you had to play a lot to make it work.”

“Working with Jost Gebers, the fees weren’t bad either, because you usually played two or three times during the Total Music Meeting. The hotel and the travel were paid for. There were differences depending on the musician. [Trombonist] Albert Mangelsdorff, for example, was already a star then and he played solo a lot. We heard that he wouldn’t play a solo concert for less than 1000 marks. I thought I’d never get that, certainly not in the trio. When I was in Wuppertal, sometimes for several weeks or months, I always helped Dieter Fränzel in his office, made phone calls, wrote letters, typed. In the evenings we went out for dinner, and his girlfriend at the time was very supportive. We got many gigs through Dieter’s contacts.”

“Later in Berlin, things were more direct. Jost called me when he wanted to invite me to play. I still knew far too little about the business. I never thought anyone would make money from us, and I still don’t think that was really possible. Politics played a big role, especially in Wuppertal, but I always lived modestly and didn’t need much for myself. If it was enough to keep me alive, then I was satisfied. I didn’t need expensive clothes and I didn’t take vacations. It was always enough, because I mostly lived alone and had no family. Vacations of the sort I like to take now didn’t exist back then. I wasn’t always working and had more days off than days playing, so I had no need to go on vacation. It wasn’t until much later that I wanted to relax and see something different in the summertime. To the seaside in summer and to the mountains in winter, that’s what I’ve been doing for many years now.”

“There were always standard fees, and it wasn’t great,” says Jost Gebers. “Let’s say 1000 German marks for five days. It certainly wasn’t more than that. And a lot of things failed because of the fees. For instance, I remember that we wanted to hire Muhal Richard Abrams one year, but he had totally unrealistic ideas about the money. That was 1976; you have to think about that too. Then we hired Leroy Jenkins, with a trio. They came and tried to interpret the contract to say they were supposed to get two times the fee. Cecil Taylor, who we could never present because there was also always an issue about rights, is the only one who handled it differently. If Steve Lacy came with a quintet, there was, say, 500 marks per set. So he’d get 2,500 marks for five people.”

Mani Neumeier originally trained to be a plumber, because he was supposed to take over his uncle’s company. He remembers: “I had to get through that training, and sometimes I also worked as a sales representative for compressor machines. That’s how I got the car that we used for our concerts. I had saved a little money, so there was a small reserve, and after 1965 I did nothing but music. An amateur doesn’t have his head free for music, even if he’s good, because he is burdened by all kinds of other duties. I’d guess we didn’t earn more than 200 marks per person back then. There was never more than 1000 marks for the whole band. I made phone calls and got a lot of gigs; I did the driving and I talked to everybody. Of course Irène was also approached about it. I’d say she organized half the gigs.”

The Political Was Always Important: We Started a Fire

Looking back at the time of his trio with Han Bennink and Fred Van Hove, political aspects were always important, at least to him and Van Hove, says Brötzmann: “Bennink didn’t give a damn, but of course he didn’t necessarily have the worries about survival we had. That’s always part of it, and I mean, who could be happy with the political direction that West Germany was taking at that time? Jazz has always been music that, wherever it arose, had an important social background. I’ve always been fascinated by that when it comes to this music and its history, because it was important for us too. It wasn’t until later that I learned that the music of Sun Ra and his band in their early Chicago period had a political significance, absolutely, and we tried to do that in our own way later. FMP had a political meaning and made a political statement, especially in Berlin, and my own basic attitude hasn’t changed much. I’ve come to learn a lot—of course we didn’t change the world, but we are able to give people a push, and show them the possibility of a different way of thinking about things. Just to open someone’s consciousness to completely different possibilities, new possibilities, that is still my main goal. When I’m in the States, I experience that again and again: this European comes and plays this weird music, and nowadays there are many young people who don’t know anything about the history of American jazz at all, but they suddenly realize that there’s something there that speaks to them. And fortunately that is happening more and more often. That’s when it makes sense to keep doing it; it gives you a bit more strength to keep going and keep trying.”

Hamid Drake also sees a fusing of music and political commitment in Irène Schweizer: “Irène also had a very social and political consciousness. I mean, I could tell that in her music, sometimes also by things that we’d be playing, certain things that she might quote when she played. And we had some discussions about those things, but I can tell that she was very socially and politically aware.”

Rüdiger Carl says that although he saw himself first and foremost as a musician and not as a politician, “it’s true that we were pissed off about all sorts of things, and Irène especially was, given her role as a woman in music and society. I was always against conformist ideas, and the music depicted that too, the whole attitude was political. Of course we were rebels; the music was rebellious and the whole inner driving force of the free music scene was rebellious. We were setting fire to the negative things we saw in society, and that included the language of the music then.”

Mani Neumeier says that from the beginning they wanted to “do away with hierarchies. The idea that, as a collective, we played together as equals came more from Uli. The consciousness of collective improvisation, that was part of the time. No bosses, down with dirty capitalism, which was also very true. And yet she was the leader. We were on the left, what else is there if you have a clear head and don’t play for a radio orchestra or a boss? If you’re self-employed, that’s actually already political.”

First Criticisms: Boos and Tumult

Schweizer was publicly criticized for the first time in 1967, the year in which her playing became freer and more radical. In the section “Nachdenkliches” [Reflections] in the Schaffhauser Nachrichten, her long-time supporter Gustav Sigg wrote about a well-attended Sunday afternoon concert she gave with her quartet in the Schaffhausen Jugendkeller on January 15, 1967. In a plea for “good and authentic jazz,” he criticizes the “shock effect” of the avant-garde. Sigg even sees the successful cultivation of a loyal audience for modern jazz as endangered:

It was left to the tenor saxophonist and guest soloist of the trio, Alex Rohr, to gently inform the young audience, in a short statement, that what was previously called ‘swing’ is also present in this music, but here it no longer has the meaning of intensive rhythm, but rather intensive playing. The music should run without interruption, and the tension must never let up. The concept in her group now is that every musician and soloist has, and must take advantage of, the greatest possible freedom.

There’s no shortage of listeners who could not avoid the impression that in the Irène Schweizer Quartet, in practical terms, everyone is playing for themselves and the ultimate goal is simply for all four players to end the number together. So if, for many, ‘art’ has to involve ‘skill’—and one must certainly acknowledge that the Irène Schweizer Trio, which has been working professionally for more than a year, has a mastery of skill—one cannot dismiss those who after this concert concluded that ‘avant-garde jazz’ equates to musical ‘masturbation.’

On negative reactions from the audience, Schweizer told the author Bert Noglik, in his book Jazz-Werkstatt International: “When we started playing free with the trio, around 1966-67, we were often booed. We had a hard time back then.” (Noglik, p. 325).

1967 – The International Breakthrough: Attacking the Piano in Montreux

On January 26th, 1967, the Irène Schweizer Trio recorded in Munich, hoping to release its first LP soon afterwards. But the recording wasn’t released until 1978, by FMP, with the title Early Tapes.

In March 1967, the Trio embarked on an extensive tour of North German jazz clubs, under the motto “New Action Jazz.” At the end of the month, they performed in a Berlin art gallery, and in July they appeared in South German clubs and played an engagement of several days at the Domicile in Munich.

Again under the motto “New Action Jazz,” the Irène Schweizer Trio plus Alex Rohr, the Peter Brötzmann Trio, and the Gunter Hampel Quartet performed on August 6th and 7th at the jazz festival in Comblain-La-Tour, Belgium. After this, the trio made recordings for Belgian radio and television in Brussels. On August 30th, the trio was broadcast live in a radio concert by FERA, the Swiss Exhibition of Television, Radio, Phonograph, and Tape Recorders. “Quite a few listeners will have perceived this second part, demanding completely new rules of the game, as ‘jazz of the day after tomorrow,’ although the trio, who have been working as professional musicians for some time now, takes the view that their music, often met with hostility, is meant for the present,” wrote the Schaffhauser Nachrichten. “In the first piece ‘Hinten’ (‘behind’—that is, the opposite of ‘in front of’) the drummer Mani Neumeier’s wild escapades were the center of attention, while in the following original piece, ‘Dollar’s Mood,’ the two melodic instruments—pianist Irène Schweizer and bassist Uli Trepte—were featured more.”

As the Trio’s concerts became more frequent, media attention also grew. Under the headline “Gedanken zu einem ‘Ärgernis’” [Thoughts on a ‘Nuisance’], the Swiss paper National-Zeitung reported on September 6, 1967 that Schweizer “is running into gruff resistance to her new sounds.” Her most recent concert in Basel had been panned by local jazz critics as “nerve-wracking,” “navel-gazing,” and “self-indulgent chaos.” The deliberate absence of swing irritated the jazz audience, and the influences of John Cage, electronic music, Indian music, and rock were misunderstood as a kind of genre fraud. Jazz audiences were now expected to do some “inconvenient catch-up work”: “The music called ‘free jazz’ or ‘new jazz’ is no longer understandable by those who want to keep listening according to the musical criteria considered essential by fans of traditional jazz. We wonder whether Irène Schweizer wouldn’t have more chance of being taken seriously if she were to move away from the label ‘jazz’ and seek a new audience free of old baggage, and in this way put her music outside the prejudices of the jazz community. Some of her ‘old’ jazz friends might then be able to approach her music with a bit more tolerance.”

On September 22, 1967, the Lucerne paper Luzerner Neuste Nachrichten reported on a concert by the Irène Schweizer Trio with saxophonist Barney Wilen in the Telecafé. This was the first free jazz concert in the concert series of the Lucerne chapter of the Musical Youth of Switzerland [Jeunesses Musicales de Suisse, JML], otherwise dedicated mostly to classical music and organized by Mani Planzer. The article says that many who came to hear melodic jazz were at first disappointed. But despite a substantial delay in starting the concert and a malfunctioning amplifier, by the end the real jazz fans were “completely delighted”: “The audience? Well, as usual, at first they were very reserved. Timid applause or an interjection here and there. But then they were electrified by the rhythms. They thawed out and gave energy to the artists.” Mani Neumeier told the newspaper that the trio played from graphic scores, partly from memory, but always expressing the mood they were in: “The pianist attacks the piano with the backs of her hands and fists when she has to, when that’s her mood. Everything is done with the aim of making the inner feeling outwardly visible.”

Schweizer says there were always two camps in the clubs, “people who liked it and others who rejected us. They often walked out of the concerts. We were attacked: ‘There’s no rhyme or reason to it. We can’t tell what you’re trying to do!’ The trio with Neumeier and Trepte accompanied Yusef Lateef at the first Montreux Festival in 1967. An agent brought us together. We were his backup band. We played a kind of free music with him, but always tonal. A bit like Coltrane; modal. The interplay worked really well. I thought Lateef was wonderful, and I think he also had fun playing with us. After Montreux we went to Germany for a few club gigs.” (Jazzthetik 7 + 8, 2006, p. 40).

Donaueschingen Music Days 1967: Jazz Meets India

In the fall, the trio performed at the Donaueschingen Festival of Contemporary Music. On October 21st, at 4 PM, the SWF Jazz Meets India session took place, featuring the Dewan Motihar Trio, the Irène Schweizer Trio, and Barney Wilen and Manfred Schoof. Shortly afterwards, Schweizer performed the same program at the Berlin Jazz Days. In the liner notes to the LP Jazz Meets India, producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt wrote: “A jazz trio and an Indian trio meet face to face. Here jazz isn’t made into a counterfeit Indian music, nor is Indian music falsely assimilated to jazz. They aren’t meeting in some abstract, uninhabitable no-man’s-land. But precisely for this reason, it’s so surprising to hear how musicians from two cultures so distant from each other communicate musically in a meaningful way.”

Manfred Schoof: “When I met Irène, she had an ongoing trio with Neumeier and Trepte. Our cooperation in a way symbolized the formation of a European community. First there was the Schoof Quintet, the Brötzmann Trio, and Gunter Hampel. These were the beginnings of free jazz in Germany, and then it slowly began to spread, but then also independently sprang up in other countries. I played with Irène for the first time in a television production by Joachim-Ernst Berendt for German radio, the SWR in Baden-Baden. After that we played together many times, and then came the big moment where I played with Irène and Barney Wilen and Indian musicians who lived in London, in a fixed group. Berendt had organized Jazz Meets India, it was free improvisation, and we adapted what we were doing to Indian music, and Irène did it incredibly well.”

Mani Neumeier remembers Jazz Meets India well, though he does not consider it one of the trio’s greatest achievements: “Joachim-Ernst Berendt had asked me two years earlier if I had any connections to Indian musicians. So I got them for him. He wanted our trio, plus two good soloists, Barney Wilen and Manfred Schoof—I would have preferred Don Cherry—and three Indian musicians who played traditional instruments like sitar, tabla, and tambura. It was an experiment that succeeded because we met each other halfway. But our trio alone was much better. I still think the FMP record Early Tapes is great.”

Isolde Schaad says of the 1967 Donaueschingen festival: “I was a very young journalist and went there with a photographer friend of mine, and in the women’s magazine annabelle I reported on Irène’s sensational appearance, with some very nice photos. That’s when I wrote the first bigger profile of Irène. She got in touch with me and thanked me, and so we got to know each other personally. Anyway, it was a crazy thing back then, a free jazz pianist at Donaueschingen. And from then on her star kept on rising.”

On the occasion of the first and last public concert of the Irène Schweizer Trio in Zürich, at the beginning of 1968 at the Museum of Decorative Arts, there was speculation about the imminent breakup of the band. “The reason for the breakup is the usual one in jazz: they have gotten so familiar with each other that they sense danger for their individual development. The Irène Schweizer Trio is ending its career at a time when they’ve begun to garner international recognition: last year the group performed at the Donaueschingen Festival and the Berlin Jazz Days.” The group gave their final concert under the name “The Amazing Free Rock Band,” with guests Barney Wilen and the Swiss rock guitarist Walt Anselmo. “‘You could dance to this music,’ Neumeier predicts, ‘and we’re going to ask the audience to do just that. And for some pieces we’re going to use two spotlights instead of the normal lighting in the hall.’” (Neue Presse Zürich, January 25, 1968). Says Schweizer: “At some point I had had enough of the trio. I was getting annoyed with Mani because he wanted to get more famous, and then with Guru-Guru he went more and more in the direction of rock. Jazz interested him less and less, and Uli just went along with the flow.”

EXCURSUS Booze and Drugs: Till You Drop

The drinking exploits of her male colleagues annoyed Schweizer from the beginning. She often went along with them, but was mostly bored. “Mani liked to drink a beer from time to time, but he and Uli weren’t drunks. I first encountered that with Rüdiger, Brötzmann, and Kowald. The amount they’d drink, night after night, I’d never seen that before. I thought it was awful, hanging out every night in the bars after playing—this was in Wuppertal. It never stopped. The bars didn’t close because there were exceptions to the regulations in Wuppertal, so they could stay until four in the morning and keep drinking until they fell over. I mostly stayed with Rüdiger, so I’d go with him after the gig, otherwise I would have had to go to his house alone. Sometimes Christa, Brötzmann’s wife, took me with her. But otherwise we usually hung around all night. I’d drink two glasses of wine and maybe a Ramazotti and wait until the men were done drinking. It was terrible, really. I didn’t understand how they could be in any kind of shape the next day. It was always a mystery to me, how they stood it.”

Neumeier recalls: “Irène liked to drink a glass of wine once in a while, nothing excessive. Uli and I smoked weed, Irène used to say she got stoned just being around us. So, weed instead of alcohol. LSD came much later.”

“Drugs weren’t such a big thing with us,” says Schweizer. “Mani was a pothead and Uli was too, to some extent. They were always smoking in the Africana. Sometimes they’d say to me, ‘come on, have a hit before we play,’ but I never wanted to do that. Sometimes I thought it was too bad that Mani always smoked before playing, because he always thought we played so well. I felt like I had to do everything myself. He’d be high and would have a completely different view of the music.”

Pierre Favre says that, for Irène and him, drugs were never important: “The two of us were never into that. When I was in Munich my colleagues smoked a lot; they liked to get high. I just enjoy playing so much, I never liked that, and neither did Irène.”

“The heavy drinking Irène’s talking about, you can’t imagine how far it went,” Brötzmann says. “It really got on her nerves, but my wife took care of Irène. Anyway, if you ask Bennink or anyone, she was the soul of the whole Wuppertal scene.”

Brötzmann’s wife Christa was totally independent, says Schweizer. “She was such a good woman; she did a good job raising their two children, really a kind of saint, while Brötzmann was just running around drinking. I have no idea what kind of marriage they had, but anyway it’s none of my business. I was often invited to dinner at their place. Christa cooked. Rüdiger had lived with Konstanze in Berlin for a while, and later lived in Wuppertal with Hans Reichel. They lived together and I stayed there a few times. I could usually stay with Rüdiger; he always had a bed if you needed one.”

Evan Parker also knows how the drinking takes on a life of its own: “I can’t recall anybody talking about the fact that Irène was a woman, particularly. She was a piano player, a good piano player, good play. That’s it. She could hold her own. She wasn’t intimidated, maybe afterwards bored. I was sometimes bored myself, but what can you do? There you are in the bar, and Peter wants another drink.”

1968 – Politicization Begins: An Enormous Force

I’ve gone beyond civil rights and human rights to creation rights.
– Eldridge Cleaver

The ’68 Movement in Switzerland began on June 29th, 1968, with the Globus riots in Zürich. Schweizer was not particularly interested in what was happening politically in Zürich, probably because, as she says today, she was still oriented towards England and was traveling a lot as a musician. Nonetheless, it was the beginning of her own political awakening. “The Platte 27 in Zürich was interesting, it was a club whose legality was dubious, where we musicians could play and the demonstrators would come after the riots. Mani, Uli, and I played there. That was the most important place in Zürich for me, because it was where politics and culture met. The Africana wasn’t a political meeting place; people came to listen to music and that was it. When the Globus riots happened, I was just a bystander in the streets when the demonstrations and then the physical confrontations took place. I didn’t even know what the students were demonstrating about. I had nothing to do with them.”

“Through the music and through meeting Black musicians, I learned about discrimination against Black people and the Black Panther movement. That interested me more than Swiss politics. Down Beat magazine was a real source of information for me, and I read Eldridge Cleaver’s book, Soul on Ice. When I heard the Archie Shepp Quintet in Donaueschingen in 1967, the Black musicians were an incredible experience for me—their expressiveness and also their aggression, but in a positive sense: they were fighting not just for a new music, free jazz, but also against racial discrimination in the US. That gave them enormous power. This feeling I got from Black musicians, of being fully committed to something, shaped my further development as a musician.” (In: Nigg, pp. 56–66).

Pierre Favre Trio 1968: Typing and Playing for Paiste

Pierre Favre had met Schweizer in 1967, and between 1968 and 1970 she was on the road with him and Peter Kowald as the Pierre Favre Trio. “Pierre had a wife and children and he took a job with Paiste, and he was looking for a secretary. And I thought, ‘Why not go back to work?’ So I went to work for Paiste. Paiste is the company in Nottwil that makes cymbals for drummers, so all the important drummers came there. Paiste had a huge practice room where there was a grand piano and a lot of drums and cymbals. That was the first time Pierre and I played together as a duo, and we were both very enthusiastic about it. I liked the way Pierre played right away. Paiste had a lot of drums sitting around, and sometimes I played with Pierre in a drum duo.”

“In the beginning I was commuting. I got the apartment later. Sometimes I stayed with Pierre and his family. Anyway, Peter Kowald got wind of it somehow. One day he showed up at the door and wanted to play with us in a trio. Pierre wasn’t so happy about that, because he didn’t really know what to do with these German free jazz musicians. He was introduced to the scene by Brötzmann and Kowald, but he never really wanted to play like that, and he still doesn’t. He wasn’t interested in that kind of free playing. With his groups he always made completely different music. I was kind of in between, and I had a good free duo with George Mráz. I was more a part of the German free jazz scene than Pierre was, but we never thought we had to emulate that. And we were put off by the chest-beating aspect of it.”

Pierre Favre adds: “I was at Paiste, a company that makes cymbals, and Irène was looking for a job, so we hired her as my secretary. It was very nice and free, I could do whatever I wanted and so we started playing. It worked right away, a real meeting from the very first moment. I was responsible for sound development, for quality control, and for contacts with drummers all around the world. I had to travel a lot and went to all the festivals as a representative for Paiste. Irène always went along, and we had chances to play. I traveled with her throughout Europe. During the day I’d show the Paiste line to drummers and in the evening we’d play in a club. If it weren’t for Paiste, we wouldn’t have been able to do this. Our first concert was in 1967 in Hungary, I remember. Our bass player was George Mráz (at that time he was still called Jiří Mráz). When he emigrated to the USA, Peter Kowald showed up.” Irène says that she played more freely with Trepte and Neumeier towards the end than with Mráz and Favre. “I had discovered Paul Bley and I enjoyed playing Carla Bley’s pieces very much. I found the way Paul Bley improvised incredibly beautiful and harmonically rich.”

EXCURSUS Peter Kowald: Playing Was Essential for Life

In Sounds like whoopataal: Wuppertal in der Welt des Jazz, E. Dieter Fränzel reports that 1966 was the crucial year for the then 22-year-old Peter Kowald: “Kowald goes on tour with Carla Bley’s quintet. After that, nothing is the same. He sees how Brötzmann is pulled off the stage in Solingen and beaten. In Hildesheim, a furious audience hits Carla Bley on the head with the microphone. After that there’s no returning to bourgeois life. Kowald gives up his studies shortly before his examinations—the topic of his doctoral thesis had already been decided—and embarks on music as a profession. And he slips through the cracks of the system. He’s supposed to do obligatory military service, but after his language studies he stays out of the country until he’s 27 and his conscription period has expired. Refusing military service would have meant recognizing the system. He goes to Switzerland.” (p.186).

“We played with Peter for a very long time,” says Favre. “Irène and I worked together at Paiste for about four years. Peter Kowald moved near us, to this little town in Switzerland, and we played together every day. He brought his wife and child and they lived in Sursee. That’s near Nottwil, where Paiste is based. The Americans always laughed because of Nottwil: it means ‘lunatic asylum,’ and it’s way out in the countryside. But we stuck together, we traveled a lot, we were young and having a good time. It was vital for us to play, we wanted to play, to find things out—who am I, how do I play, how do I react—and this experience with Irène was very special. It was a time of great change. We wanted to break up these petrified harmonic structures; we couldn’t hear things that way anymore, it was much too conventional for us. For Irène, there was also the Women’s Movement; she wanted to fight for that. It all started in 1968.”

When Favre and Schweizer were working in Nottwil near Paiste, they both lived in Sursee, just a few kilometers from Willisau, so it was very easy for Niklaus Troxler to talk with them and organize concerts. He remembers: “Irène and Pierre had their jobs and their income at Paiste, and Peter Kowald was living in an inn, playing bass there, practicing and waiting for the next gig. As far as I know, they always paid him a little more so they could keep him around. Kowald was traveling a lot with his little station wagon. I was also traveling a lot, but Kowald always got there before me, even if he wasn’t on the program. He wanted to meet the musicians; he was very proactive about it. Irène got along very well with Buschi Niebergall; then Rüdiger Carl and Louis Moholo came along.”

Peter Brötzmann says: “When Peter Kowald moved to Sursee, that was exactly when I started playing with Buschi Niebergall, and at the time I was more interested in Buschi. Kowald of course knew that. Kowald probably saw the move as a chance to get ahead, and back then you could risk that. Today, I think, making that kind of move is a lot more difficult if you have children and a family; it’s just a completely different financial burden. But, apart from that, Kowald always went for what he wanted. His later visits to New York certainly had a big influence on the New York scene, because he brought a lot of European ideas to New York. That was the beginning of an exchange that is taken for granted now.”

Rüdiger Carl remembers Kowald’s diplomatic skills: “He was very flexible and could do all kinds of things: he had studied languages, did translations, was turning up everywhere, was able to chat with the cultural officials. He was really good at it; he made it work. He was a kind of artist of life. He always had a Ford bus or something to run around in. With the exception of Louis Moholo, who just didn’t come if he couldn’t afford the flight, we all somehow managed it—if we had a job, then we’d get there. We were always organized, but none of us was rich. But Kowald was always there first.”

Evan Parker also remembers Kowald as a tireless networker: “Peter Kowald was the man that introduced me to Brötzmann. That led to everything in Germany and Holland, because through Brötzmann, I met Han Bennink and Misha and Willem Breuker, so then was immediately in the heart of things in Europe. Back then, Kowald was living in Antwerp, when I first went over to visit, and then he moved. I don’t know if he moved directly from there to Switzerland, but he certainly made a gesture of ‘I want to play with these people.’ I probably was the first saxophonist they used and later on, they invited Trevor Watts to be part of it. But Kowald was the key to a lot of things. As you pick your way through the history, you’ll find his name crops up a lot, because he was prepared to move around. As maybe the premiere networker out of the whole scene, he introduced a lot of people to one another, so it was through him I was invited to be in that, when it was a quartet. Kowald introduced me to Manfred Eicher, another key person. A couple of years before, there was the label ECM. And then there was this extraordinary Peter Brötzmann record produced by Manfred Eicher. Manfred did a few independent productions before he started ECM, and that was a very, very strange mixture of personalities and musical approaches, aesthetics, sensibilities, all of those things. It’s a historical fact.”

Asked about the most important stages in his musical development, Peter Kowald told author Bert Noglik, in his book Jazz-Werkstatt International 1980: “I wanted to play with other musicians for a while. That’s why I went to Switzerland in 1969, where I played mainly in a trio with Pierre Favre and Irène Schweizer. Occasionally Evan Parker joined us” (p. 455). There weren’t too many musicians working in this area at the time, Kowald says. “The people we were in contact with back then were mainly Irène Schweizer, Mani Neumeier, and Pierre Favre in Switzerland; John Stevens, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, and Paul Rutherford in England; and Han Bennink, Misha Mengelberg, and Willem Breuker in the Netherlands” (Ibid).

Willisau: Radical and Shocking

On February 13, 1968, Irène Schweizer, George Mraz, and Pierre Favre played the Kreuzstube in Willisau. On this occasion, Schweizer’s first performance in Willisau, the audience was reportedly shocked by the radical music, but Troxler was enthusiastic about it. (Meinrad Buholzer. Jazz in Willisau. Wie Niklaus Troxler den Free Jazz nach Willisau brachte [Jazz in Willisau. How Niklaus Troxler Brought Free Jazz to Willisau], p. 11). Niklaus Troxler had met Schweizer in 1968: “I had met Pierre Favre not long before that in Lucerne, where he played with Mal Waldron in the Kleintheater. I was just getting fascinated by free jazz, and Pierre told me about a new trio he was planning, the Pierre Favre Trio, with Irène and George Mráz. That was the beginning of my history with Irène and Pierre, which became like a magnet for me, because later they also played with other musicians like Trevor Watts. But that was Irène’s doing. She had been in London in the early 1960s; she had connections in the London scene and she made a lot of things happen. It was called the Pierre Favre Trio, but it was really co-led by Irène and Pierre.”

“At the end of the 1960s there was a lot of political activity in Lucerne, but not in Willisau. Lucerne was a different scene from Zürich; there was a young left-wing movement, almost what we’d call Autonomists now. They protested a lot and things were happening there that I experienced. Some of them also came to the concerts. At that time a creative kind of rock music was coming up, and after the free jazz concerts we’d always go to this dive bar in an old barn and listen to that music—Ten Years After and Jefferson Airplane—and dance to it. Irène and Peter Kowald came along too. The concerts were in the hall of what used to be the Hotel Kreuz, which is gone now. Earlier I had organized blues concerts. We had more people at those. At the free jazz concerts, at the beginning there would be a hundred people and at the end there’d be twenty. That was pretty tough. I liked blues and free jazz, but the audience didn’t; there was a total split. I decided to devote myself to the new music. In 1969, blues musicians like Champion Jack Dupree and Eddie Boyd and Irène played with Evan Parker in concerts I put on. That wasn’t going to work for long, but it was very interesting. Guest musicians like Evan Parker stayed with Pierre in Sursee, others traveled further or stayed in the Hotel Kreuz, or later in the Mohren. Nowadays the musicians stay in Sursee, because I prefer to have most of them stay in one big hotel—it’s easier to pick them up that way. It’s twelve kilometers to Willisau. They go from the airport to the hotel, from the hotel to the stage, and back again.”

Pierre Favre Trio 1969: Berlin was the Center

For the recording of Santana, the trio had hardly any money and only one and a half hours of studio time, Pierre Favre recalls. “Play what you can and voilá, that was Santana. It had to happen fast, because our funds were very limited. We rented the studio of a good friend and made this record. First, we produced it privately in 1969 and sold it at concerts. Then FMP made a second edition. Berlin was the center for this music at that time. Paris was completely different, and Italy was something else again. The recordings were made with absolutely no discussion ahead of time. We just played and it worked. Later Evan Parker joined us. That was the quartet. We traveled a lot with that group also. But we never talked about the music, we just played.”

Evan Parker remembers his first concerts with Schweizer and Favre: “I remember 1969; it was the Pierre Favre Quartet formerly. It was basically a kind of thing we called a grace-and-favors type job. At a time when Pierre himself was overseeing the quality control for the Paiste Cymbal Company, Irène was his secretary. She takes everything pretty seriously. We played quite a few of the festivals because Pierre always had good connections. He was very well established and he knew a lot of the Paris-placed musicians because he’d work there. So through Pierre, we had contacts. It was totally free playing. We never discussed anything. We just played, and it worked very well.”

“The hall is full, the audience in turtleneck sweaters,” reported the Tages-Anzeiger in early 1969, describing a concert evening at the Radio Studio Zürich. “Free jazz, the revolution against the formulas of commercial jazz. Ecstasy with an intellectual impact. Unfortunately the drummer (Pierre Favre) is mostly too loud, and confuses rhythm with noise. The pianist (Irène Schweizer) is constantly injecting Webern-esque sounds into the mix, but her contribution is often drowned out. The saxophonist (Evan Parker) whimpers sporadically, the double bassist’s (Peter Kowald) bow loses hair in clumps. From my notes: ‘Pigs dying in a hail of bullets.’” (Tages-Anzeiger, February 26, 1969).

Berlin 1969: Young Irène on the Scene

Beginning with the first Total Music Meeting in 1968, whose aim was to provide an alternative, musically and in terms of cultural politics, and continuing until the Berlin Jazz Days, the Berlin jazz scene was institutionally divided. In his 1969 report on the Berlin Jazz Days, journalist Rolf Ulrich Kaiser wrote: “This jazz no longer has anything to do with ‘social criticism.’ It has become refined entertainment.” Another criticism was that “the young generation of today’s working musicians” was ignored. In contrast, at the second FMP Total Music Meeting “twenty free jazz players met in the Berlin bar Litfass. In groups around Brötzmann, Schoof, and Irène Schweizer, one heard ravishing, gripping, committed sounds, which however fit better in a dark bar than in a comfortable concert hall. These ‘Berlin Jazz Days’ unmistakably demonstrated the gap between ‘entertainment jazz’ and contemporary jazz.”

EXCURSUS FMP 1969 – The Beginnings: I Was Still Young

“I think I first heard Irène on Jazz Meets India in 1967,” says Jost Gebers who, together with Peter Brötzmann, founded the influential Berlin label Free Music Production (FMP) in 1969. FMP gave Irène Schweizer and the musicians of the European free jazz scene their earliest opportunity to document the development of their music. Jost Gebers remembers the beginnings: “A year or two later, in late summer, I went to Nottwil in Switzerland with Brötzmann. Irène was living there at the time. But actually we were there because of Peter Kowald, who was also living there. And they had this trio with Favre, sometimes as a quartet with Evan. That was the situation when we started FMP, and we decided that they should play at the second Total Music Meeting in 1969. Then our collaboration with Irène started somehow. At some point the trio no longer existed, but there was a short-lived quartet with Favre, Irène, Trevor Watts, and Jürg Grau, a Swiss trumpeter. But that didn’t last either. They also played one of our events once, I think in a workshop. Then Irène went through a period of looking for something. She had nothing then, no fixed group. She played a few times in a trio in Berlin with the drummer Manfred Kussatz, with whom I had played earlier, and different bassists. Buschi Niebergall was there once. Once there was also a Berlin bass player, I remember, Werner Scheel—he’s still around now, but he plays Dixieland. Then there was a quintet with Alan Skidmore, Malcolm Griffith, and Irène. And then there was the beginning of the whole history with Rüdiger Carl, and their first quartet with Heinrich Hock and Arjen Gorter on bass. There’s a record of that. It then became a trio with Louis Moholo and Rüdiger and Irène. Then a duo with Rüdiger and Irène. So there were these combinations that kept going. The duo work went on for quite a long time, I think. And then it evolved into the COWWS Quintet, again with Rüdiger and Irène, plus others. That’s Irène’s FMP story in a nutshell.”

Gebers recalls that they were stopped at the border for a long time on their trip to Switzerland, and arrived in Nottwil at a late hour: “We had trouble finding something to eat. We just sat in a pub somewhere and explained the whole model, what we had in mind, what we wanted to do, and we made agreements. We talked about having the trio play in Berlin that year. That must have been in September ’69. Brötzmann and I traveled that summer and visited all the musicians to make agreements. It was basically the foundational trip of FMP. FMP had a different goal when we started it: the whole thing was supposed to be a management company. I was supposed to make sure the musicians had proper work and, looking back, I have to say I’m absolutely not well-suited for that kind of work. That’s why we let go of that idea very quickly. But at first we made management contracts with all the musicians. That’s why we were driving around. I was supposed to be the manager, that’s how the whole thing was planned.”

“In the early days, mainly the management part didn’t work out. Everybody was really enthusiastic and thought, ‘now we’re all going to be swimming in money, we have so much to do now!’ Of course it didn’t work out that way. But the two bigger projects did work: the Total Music Meeting and the Free Music Workshop. In the beginning, only Brötzmann and I worked on those projects. The collective wasn’t formed until October 1972. Until then it was always Brötzmann and I who did everything. But after that it got more comprehensive. The first records we released, except for European Echoes, they’re all Brötzmann records. We also put together the first programs at the Total Music Meeting. Irène was at the first Total Music Meeting in 1969, in the trio with Pierre and Kowald. Then she came with the quartet.”

The first FMP LP, European Echoes by Manfred Schoof, with Schweizer, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Fred Van Hove, Arjen Gorter, Buschi Niebergall, Peter Kowald, Han Bennink, Pierre Favre, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Gerd Dudek, Peter Brötzmann, Paul Rutherford, Enrico Rava, and Hugh Steinmetz, was the big debut, released with much fanfare in 1969, according to Gebers. “I was in Bremen when it was recorded there in June. And when we talked about it, Brötzmann suggested that we use the tapes. ‘Talk to Schoof!’ I don’t even remember who it was in Bremen at the time, but someone who was favorably inclined towards us gave us the tapes for free.”

In the 1960s, when he himself was playing bass, Gebers was always trying to find places to play in Berlin. That’s how the first Brötzmann concerts in Berlin came about, he says: “Bennink also asked me sometimes, and I’d try to find some work. There were a few places where you could do something from time to time. At times there were several groups. So, there was a trio I played in. Then there was a quartet with Rüdiger, in which I played bass. And Sven-Åke Johansson had various projects here and there. But every time Sven played could be the last time, because he did some crazy things sometimes. In this place, Litfass, once he was playing with a trio or a quartet, I don’t remember. Anyway, some violinist was playing the piano. The piano was then pushed through the bar, and behind the felt of the piano Sven-Åke had stuck some newspaper. When the piano was in front of the door, he set it on fire. The audience was standing there. At first there was applause, but then everyone looked at each other, realizing: that’s the exit, and it’s the only one. And that was the end of that. The pub owner, Manolis, said ‘I’m never booking you again!’ You had to be a little careful with Sven. He often pulled stunts like that.”

Rüdiger Carl got to know Gebers as early as the mid-1960s in Berlin: “We had a quartet together. He was always on the road and always producing something; he had his small clubs and the basement in the youth club. He was always on the move, and he introduced me to this new era of American free jazz and showed me some things that I didn’t know about, in my youthful ignorance. I had come to Berlin when I was 19, in 1963, and I’d already been connected to FMP for a while when Irène first got involved.”

“Jost Gebers probably heard about me from Brötzmann and Kowald. I often went to Wuppertal with Mani and Uli and played there,” says Schweizer. “Jost invited me to the second Total Music Meeting in 1969, with Pierre and Kowald. There was no hotel; we almost always stayed at someone’s home. I stayed in, certainly, more than twenty different apartments, with friends of Kowald and Gebers. There was a clique of friends who always came to the Total Music Meeting and put up the musicians who played there. These were fans who came to every concert, to the Academy, to Quasimodo; they were always there.”

In 1972, at the age of 21, the Swiss painter Bignia Corradini moved to Berlin, where, as part of the Junge Wilden (Young Wild Ones) movement, she exhibited her work in the legendary gallery on the Moritzplatz. From 1975 to 1982, Irène often stayed at her apartment on Krefelder Strasse, in the Moabit district of Berlin, when she came to play in the city.

Corradini: “In the room in Berlin we had the typical three-piece mattresses from the flea market, in case guests came. It certainly wasn’t the most comfortable—the room was a walk-through between two other rooms, and the individual mattress parts usually came apart while you were sleeping. But we were young, making art, and it was all about doing things and creating opportunities. Irène and I met in Zürich in the early 1970s. I remember that Irène came to my first solo exhibition in Zürich in 1975, and she also came to my exhibitions sometimes in later years. In the early 1970s I was painting pictures of women and landscapes and I was involved in the Women’s Movement. I admired Irène and I really liked her music. She played without sheet music; she improvised. When she plays with other musicians, there’s little talk beforehand and everyone is given plenty of space to play. I think we both work with an open concept. I see a certain parallel there. That interests me as a painter, because Irène is doing it in music. We all stand in relations and contexts, shaped by music history and art history. Tradition always plays a role, even for an autodidact like Irène. I listened to a lot of jazz back then and had various connections to the scene. And of course we went to the FMP concerts, which were important events. The stronger the Women’s Movement became, the more women came from Zürich to the concerts in Berlin. I remember cooking once for ten women who visited Irène in our apartment before her performance. She wanted to eat in the afternoon, not too soon before her concert at the Academy of Arts. So I took the day off and cooked spaetzle and ragout for everyone. I moved in 1985, but we’ve often seen each other since then at concerts. In 2003 Irène played a solo concert at my exhibition in Arbon, and in 2006 at LA VOUTA in Lavin, in the Engadin region. What I like about Irène is that in all the years I’ve known her, she’s been true to herself. I think Irène is authentic, clear, she’s a fighter, and at the same time she’s modest. I was reminded of all that recently, when we saw each other again when she played at the A L’ARME Festival in Berlin in 2015.”

“I was still young,” Schweizer recalls about the FMP years, “and at the time I liked it better than staying in a single room in a dirty hotel somewhere. I liked the people, I thought it was great to stay with them. Eventually the charm of that wore off; I got tired of it. Back then, we were paid something, but really very little. It was a very important time for me: through the FMP concerts I got to know all my colleagues and friends, the Dutch musicians, the English ones, and sometimes there were Black American musicians like Anthony Braxton and George Lewis. It was great.”

“Thousands of people came to the FMP concerts, it was a paradise. Free music was revolutionary music, and in Berlin our music got more radical. With Rüdiger in the quartet, it was completely free music. When Rüdiger realized that his Brötzmann imitation wasn’t getting him anywhere, he started playing more clarinet, and then accordion. That was more interesting for me than hearing him copy Brötzmann for two hours. Kowald once called this period of the music the ‘Kaputtspielphase’: play until you break, or the music does. I went through that phase. It was often insanely loud, it was like you were in a trance. Some people got up and left because they couldn’t stand the noise; others sat there with their mouths open, astonished.”

“In the beginning it was a basic rule that the musicians were to be there the whole time, and available to the audience,” says Jost Gebers. “There were real discussions, especially at the Akademie, out in the pub. So, people could go and say, ‘Brötzmann, what kind of shit is that?’ For us it was a matter of principle; we said you had to be there and you had to answer questions when they came up. And also in the early days—now I’m talking about the Academy of Arts—there were public rehearsals in the afternoons, where people could come listen to a rehearsal at five, for free. But we gave that up quickly. Because you can’t rehearse certain things at all, and because a lot of people would come to the rehearsals, but then not to the concerts, even though the concerts only cost 1.10 or 1.20 marks per day. That was kind of funny. I think we stopped in 1971. The only one who really rehearsed anyway was Steve Lacy, with his quintet. That made sense, he was playing pieces, but for the others it was nonsense, because they didn’t rehearse on principle. A lot of them made fun of it.”

Louis Moholo looks back on the Berlin FMP time with great emotion: “God bless those years, man. FMP, those were the days. I don’t think they will ever come back again. God was with us then, fantastic scene. Straight from heaven. Yeah, very important. We can’t imagine what kind of music was being played in there, man. Jesus Christ, a lot of music, man, and I like the idea. The ideas behind it, man, like just everybody is the same. It’s a fantastic lesson, man. Like no band leader; it is a collective of musicians. I live in Cape Town now, in Langa Township. I did have a heart attack actually from this fucking music, man, I’ll tell you. Some of my friends have died, especially drummers. Maybe it’s just paying my dues. I have a pacemaker now. But then, there’s nothing I know better now. I had my lovely, lovely hours; I had my lovely times. And when it happens, the sunshine is fantastic, like playing with Irène, that’s some sunshine. Playing with Peter Brötzmann, Cecil Taylor, that’s some sunshine, man. Yeah, it’s heaven. I don’t know when I’m going to play with Cecil Taylor now and with Irène Schweizer as well. It’s been a long time, too.”

FMP was very active, agrees Rüdiger Carl: “Concerts all year round, two festivals a year in the good times, over long distances, and a few extra concert situations as well. At the Grunewaldsee, in the Rathaus Charlottenburg, whatever was available, clubs and this and that, it was very lively. Gebers made it all happen by himself. You have to take your hat off to him.”

“Until Dieter Hahne joined, in the mid-1970s, I usually organized everything on my own,” says Gebers. “In 1968 all the musicians stayed in a kind of youth hostel in the area that we could rent. Everybody slept there; many also stayed with friends, of course. Hotels only in case of emergency. For the Workshop it was a little better, because the Academy of Arts provided some money for it. A little, but at least it was possible to stay in a house. They had some apartments in the Hanseatenweg where some of the musicians could stay. There was also a small hotel near the academy; many people used to stay there. Brötzmann often stayed with Thomas Schmitt. Everyone had their friends, it worked out somehow.”

“People often stayed with the artist Thomas Schmitt, too,” says Rüdiger Carl. They frequently hung out together in the Paris-Bar, but then he “became difficult and thin-skinned. Later you’d get a hotel paid for in the budget. I think that started around the end of 1970.”

“At a certain point, we got a guarantee from the Berliner Festspiele for the Total Music Meeting,” says Gebers. “It started sometime in the mid-1970s and lasted until 1988, when they said, ‘No, we don’t have any more money, we’re not giving you any more.’ Not long before we could even go public with it, the Department of Cultural Affairs jumped in and said, ‘Okay, we’ll give you money for the project.’ Then in 1988 we did an emergency program, and from 1989 onwards the Department of Cultural Affairs was involved. This of course lasted a long time, with constant discussions, until finally the decision was made: ‘We’ll give FMP an institutional subsidy, out of which you have to pay for everything, but that’s all you’re getting.’ So that was clearly a different situation.”

“With the exception of Brötzmann’s concerts, almost no one but insiders came to FMP events. There was no scene for this music yet. You had to fight for every single person, to get them to listen to the stuff we were doing. And that was true for the musicians as well. They all made their reputations from those FMP times. And of course it was the same with all the live events, whether you look at Moers or Willisau or Fabrikjazz. The labels that came along later always had the advantage that a scene existed. There were people reporting on it, there was an audience for it, there were some customers who bought LPs. It’s totally different from what FMP did in the early days. When we started, there was nothing at all.”

EXCURSUS FMP Archive and Records with Irène Schweizer: Recording in the Basement

During the entire time that he was working on FMP, Jost Gebers was also a full-time social worker for the city of Berlin, at the youth leisure center in the Olbersstrasse at the Jungfernheide tram station. He had the FMP recording studio set up in the basement there, until a burglary in the summer of 1979. “There was a rehearsal room in the basement, which we had converted into a studio. Alexander von Schlippenbach’s grand piano was there, and he always had access and could rehearse there. We really recorded a lot of things in the studio. I set up all the equipment so that all you had to do was press ‘record’ and ‘stop.’ That meant I only had to be there for half a day to help adjust the sound. And then the musicians could use the machine, and whenever they wanted to record something, they could do it.”

“The recordings for Tuned Boots, with Carl, Schweizer, and Moholo—that was in Moers and in the studio on Olbersstrasse in Berlin, Side Two,” explains Gebers. “In that early period, Moers was actually Wuppertal. Brötzmann and Kowald did the programs there. Once we also did the sound tech work, it was still in the courtyard then. Those are probably the recordings. I didn’t even know that I did those. We made the others later in Berlin, as additions. They probably played at the club Flöz, I don’t know. Tuned Boots—one recording is at the workshop, that’s the thing with the trio, with Louis, Side one. And that’s the duo. And then we recorded them live. Hans Wewerka had the rights; in 1966, ’67, ’68 he financed the recordings and in return he got the publishing rights. Later he told me that he still had the recordings, and then I said, ‘yeah, send me something so I can listen to it,’ and then I bought two things. One was this early trio of Irène with Trepte and Neumeier: Early Tapes. And there was a Schoof quintet thing. And they somehow booked it here. Not anymore now, but in the beginning.”

“Santana is our production; we included it in the catalog along with many others. And it’s the only mono recording. We did that with Favre. V-Mann-Suite was at the Total Music Meeting. I don’t know if you can interpret it politically. Cordial Gratin was a duo of Schweizer and Joëlle Léandre. Those were the FMP records. And then there were special editions like For Example. The S-serie (‘S series’) are things the musicians wanted to do. I didn’t want to do it. They did them at their own risk, and we manufactured them and distributed them.”

“There’s another duo of Irène with Kowald, and then there was the duo with Marilyn Crispell. In 1990 there was a programming idea to put an American and a European on stage together, every day for five days. Irène asked, ‘Who that could be?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, is it possible to have a woman pianist?’ she asked. I said, ‘Sure, we’ll set up a second piano’. And then this combination happened, and a really wonderful record came from that. Finally there is the COWWS Quintet, the second production was still with Jay Oliver, Grooves ’n’ Loops. Messer, these are the trio recordings, re-released, all the trio material with Louis Moholo, complete.”

“If we ended up sitting on 300 LPs back then, that was a risk FMP took. A fixed sum was paid out to the artists, regardless of the size of the line-up. If ten musicians played, the leader was responsible for dividing it up. If it was a solo record, then the one person made more money. It was per LP, a fixed sum for every LP produced. Under certain circumstances we paid up front, sometimes 500 marks or something. That already existed. So it depended, sometimes in advance, sometimes after or when the record was released. I didn’t have anything to do with these things until we did the publishing, in the 1980s. And then we got some help from a GEMA insider who called me once and said, ‘Look, you’re doing this wrong. You have to do it this way.’ In general, it was like everyone defined it differently. One would say it was aleatoric music, the other would say it was improvisation. And GEMA always paid up. But with these things it was at the lowest level that they had. Because otherwise you would have had to submit scores, printed scores, so that you would get a better rate.”

In the online history of FMP that he created, Gebers has, over time, provided all the reliable information he has about the history of FMP. In doing so, he has compared all the program announcements and information he could find with his own notes and records, so as to reconstruct the line-ups and locations of the concerts and recordings as reliably as possible. “There are certainly also things of Irène’s on tape somewhere in the archive. I just dug out the Feminist Improvising Group. I have to sit down and digitize it. I have a very vivid memory of it. We wanted to document the Total Music Meeting, similar to what we did with For Example at the workshop. And there was an aspect of the Feminist Improvising Group, for example when they played an Eisler parody, that I always had in mind. I thought if we did something like that it would have to be released. But like I said, I just recently dug it out and I have to sit down and listen to the three sets, to see what’s actually there. It’s always a bit difficult to remember these things exactly because at the time I was working. I couldn’t say, given the fragments I heard, if what happened on stage was really good or was junk. You don’t hear the music until afterwards. We recorded everything, and most of it hasn’t been released.”

“I have a converted garage here in my house. There’s nothing but tapes in it. And no one has ever heard them! A lot of them, from before we switched over to multitrack recording, haven’t been mixed. It’s going slowly. At the moment I’m in the process of digitizing the LPs, so they’ll be available again, at least as downloads.”

“People say that the 1970s were Irène’s Berlin and FMP years. The LP with John Tchicai, Willi the Pig, was recorded in Willisau and re-released by John Corbett. We didn’t work together with Willisau. We knew about each other—it wouldn’t have been competition unless he had done it in Berlin. But Willisau, no, that wasn’t the center.”

Photo: Christian Broecking

Jost Gebers, FMP archive, 2013

EXCURSUS Means of Production: Pulverizing the Piano

“On the tours, Irène sometimes had a very hard time physically, because the pianos were so bad that she attacked them with her elbows,” says Pierre Favre. “The next day, she’d have bandaged forearms, black and blue and sore, and she could hardly play that night because of the pain. It was a hard lesson.”

“She never got involved with electric pianos; she didn’t want anything to do with them. She always used whatever was there,” adds Rüdiger Carl. “There were a few clubs that had enough self-respect to tune the piano beforehand, but there were also situations where she said, ‘I’m knocking out all the hammers, I’ve had it with this piece of crap.’ She did it once. I think it was in Ulm. The piano was already in pathetic shape when we got there, and afterwards there was nothing left; she really played it to pieces. We also smashed a grand piano with hammers in Wuppertal, in the Von der Heydt Museum. It was kind of a stupid throwback to a Fluxus ‘action’ from the old days. But we were taking revenge, because they gave us this old grand piano, completely out of tune. It hadn’t been playable in a long time—the strings didn’t even hold. After three or four notes it started falling apart. So I said, come on, let’s bust it up. We used it as a percussion instrument, so to speak, and beat it with hammers. They were pissed off at us afterwards, but at least they could finally throw it in the garbage instead of foisting it on people.”

“Back when there were no amplifiers or monitors, it was really bad,” Schweizer remembers. “You could barely hear the bass and piano. We couldn’t hear each other on stage. In the early days you rarely heard what the others were playing. Often it was pure energy and accident, to be honest. I was always amazed that it sounded good to the audience. At the Berlin Jazz Days, of course, there were concert grand pianos and the acoustics were perfect, but in the small student clubs, thousands of them, there was just nothing. We dealt with that for many years with Mani, and later with Louis. And Louis and Rüdiger were always very loud. What could I do? I didn’t have a choice, it was hardcore. Back when the pianos were still unamplified, I played with my elbows a lot, and the next morning I’d need a bandage because my arms were black and blue and sore. I had to play like that for people to hear me at all. It’s unthinkable today; it’s insane. The grand piano is much better suited to our music, which is similar in timbre to modern classical music.”

“I’ve also played on every bad piano there is,” says Alexander von Schlippenbach. “Sometimes I might have cut a finger, but I don’t believe it takes the form Irène’s talking about—the bruises and bandages. That probably belongs more in the realm of legend. But I wasn’t there. I never experienced that. Of course, I myself abused pianos with everything I had. Maybe now I don’t do that so much, since I’m interested in other things. But I don’t remember getting injuries like that from playing the piano. And it couldn’t be like that, really. She had good technique, why would she beat herself bloody?”

Evan Parker also experienced how bad the pianos could be: “I can remember one specific incident when we went with the Schlippenbach Trio to play in Zürich. It was a new place that Irène and the piano player Urs Voerkel found. It had a really bad piano, and Alex was complaining to Irène after the first set, and Irène said, ‘Okay, in the second set, you’ll finish it off.’ Alex’s job was to destroy the piano. And he did it. Yeah, but I mean we’ve played on quite a few Steinways and Bösendorfers; we can’t complain. Everybody has to start somewhere and move on, partly by being determined and persistent. I think that generation of Alex is still playing, Irène is still playing, I’m still playing, Pierre is still playing.”

EXCURSUS The Pianists: A Completely New Music

“Marilyn Crispell was the first woman pianist I met personally,” says Schweizer. “Later Geri Allen was also at the Total Music Meeting once. I heard Joanne Brackeen when I was in New York. Her husband was Charles Brackeen. She plays very differently from me; she has her own style. But I never knew her personally. I already knew Carla Bley in the 1960s when she was here with the Jazz Realities, the quartet with Brötzmann, Michael Mantler, and Aldo Romano on drums. Sometimes there was an American/European sextet with Steve Lacy and Kent Carter—I heard Carla for the first time during a European tour of that group. And in 1972 she invited me to a joint workshop concert in Hamburg. Carla hardly played her own compositions; Paul Bley mainly recorded trio and solo records with her pieces. I know her piece ‘Ida Lupino’ from his version. Paul Bley was a great influence for me, after I digested Cecil Taylor and his clusters. These little melodies of Carla’s were like a springboard for playing freely. There were no chord changes; it was all very open and free. I still think her very beautiful melodies are brilliant, and of course her arrangements for Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. That orchestra is still one of the best.”

“Irène is an extraordinary figure,” says Peter Brötzmann. “Even in the US, there’s no woman player who went along with us on our path, or who gave us some kind of push, the way she did. Carla Bley is a wonderful woman, but of course she was never a virtuoso on the piano. She writes beautiful pieces and I also liked her not so special technique—of course Irène had that from the beginning. But these are just my personal preferences.”

“Mainly, I decided to say no,” says Carla Bley. “When we’ve finished a beautiful piece of music, we celebrate, for us it’s an occasion for happiness. The peace afterwards, we enjoy it and nurture it. I started with free music, and after the long path I’ve traveled I no longer need these wild things where no one knows how it will end. I want order and organization in my music; I’m done with free improvisation.”

Schweizer says she was never that interested in questions of technique, “Except during the short phase when I wanted to copy Cecil Taylor. When I played free music, you had to play it like that; that was the only way, with the clusters, the elbows, technique was very important. Fortunately, I got away from that. It was in 1969 in Berlin, when I heard both Cecil Taylor and Thelonious Monk at the Jazz Days. When I heard Monk solo, I said, ‘Man – that’s it, that touches me so much more.’”

Rüdiger Carl also heard Cecil Taylor at the Berlin Jazz Days: “He looked splendid in a turquoise suit, and he played the piano to pieces. Afterwards came Monk, solo, and he played ‘Blue Monk’ and his simple things on this out-of-tune piano, wearing his hat. And it totally messed me up. I forgot Cecil immediately as soon as I heard Monk. I was absolutely fascinated by how he did it, how he sat down, unimpressed by the chaos and brouhaha around all the modern stuff that had just been on stage, and just played his little tinkling thing. It hit me like a hammer; I had to try to get my young head around it, to figure out why it suddenly affected me like that.”

Marilyn Crispell also greatly admired Cecil Taylor and would have liked to play with him: “We like each other a lot, and we respect each other as musicians a lot. He seems to respect what I do. I hear it from other people, you know, he’ll say something. There was an opportunity for us to play together in Canada years ago, but he said no. He said, ‘I’ll play on a double bill, but not together.’ So I can understand that, although it was disappointing. I would have loved to play with him, and also do some of the theatrical stuff. He does a lot of movement and poetry, and I could really see doing all that together with him, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. When I first heard him, I thought, in a way, he was doing the kind of stuff that I was composing, but he’s doing it in the feeling of jazz. The stuff I heard was with bass and drums and saxophone, and also, it’s a leap from classical music to jazz. You can play the same thing, the same exact notes, and if a classical musician plays it, it’s going to sound different from a jazz musician playing it because of the touch, the phrasing, the accents, the feeling, everything. It’s going to be different. So hearing Cecil was like a revelation. It showed me a direction that I could go in.”

On the topic of influences and pianists, Irène Schweizer has always described Misha Mengelberg as an important role model: “For me he is the best pianist in Europe that I know of. Even the way he talked, he liked to talk and could talk for a long time. Even when I didn’t quite understand him, it always fascinated me.”

“People would always say that there were four pianists in Europe: Misha Mengelberg, Fred Van Hove, Alex von Schlippenbach, and Irène,” says Rüdiger Carl. “I’m sure there was someone else in Holland, London, or Japan, but these were the ones who played this kind of thing on the piano, a free approach, hitting it with elbows and fists and boards.”

“There were people, no need to argue about it, we knew for example that Fred Van Hove had his own very solid track, his own thing, and he always refused to be compared to anyone else. He once said ‘I have more of the Antwerp Glockenspiel and the Grote Markt than Cecil Taylor in my playing,’ for example. Maybe there was some competition there, but they listened to each other and had absolute respect for each other. What Misha did was viewed with great curiosity, because he came from a completely different area, with a different touch. And the way he fused it with his Monk thing—he was a strange, free thinker, and he could perform completely differently than everyone else. Everyone else was always busy, but Misha could just get up and smoke a cigarette or take off his sweater, he knew that that was already something.”

About the differences between the FMP pianists, Fred Van Hove says: “Everyone brings their own thing to it, we are four different people and we play different things. Jost Gebers put on a piano festival. Not everything was good, but it was a great adventure. I played with Misha; there were good ideas there. With Alex it didn’t go so well. With Irène I did better. Irène goes back to bebop, she can do that, you can hear that in her improvising.”

“The pianists in the FMP circle are each very individual and different in their attitude, and also in their strengths,” says Alexander von Schlippenbach. “We were part of a movement that produced all this new music, the new jazz. That connected us, but of course we were quite different from each other. Misha is a very special character, who also dropped out to some extent. We certainly had our big differences, but we weren’t in competition with each other, although competition always plays a part, I can’t deny that. Of course you always want to be successful, for your own concerts to go just as well as the others, and you want to see how the others are doing. But it was never any kind of jealousy or backbiting. I really didn’t experience that. We knew that we belonged together somehow.”

“Alex’s playing is very diverse, very strong, he’s inspired by his own diversity,” adds Manfred Schoof. “He can play incredibly brutally and loud; then in the next moment he can invent something totally warm and cordial. Irène is rounder, as a whole. I would say rounder and more feminine. I also remember her playing more and more in the middle register of the piano. Maybe I’m wrong, but I would say that her sound was rounder and more feminine. And Fred Van Hove was a mixture of the two. He could also play with sounds, but different than the way Alex did it. So they were all very, very different.”

For Peter Brötzmann, it is important that Schweizer was also a good drummer: “Back then she used to play drums now and then, because she liked to, and of course you could hear that in her piano playing. It was a very percussive approach, a very surprising sound. Irène also used to go out with us, all the time, and she never made a scene. She was always there with us, and you could always count on her when you needed to. There were three pianists in the FMP scene at that time: Fred Van Hove, Irène, and Alex, who always made his own special things. My collaboration with Irène just felt natural, and I always like people who can push you a little, who have that forward momentum, and she was great at it, she could kick your ass, I’ll put it that way, and I liked that.”

Alexander von Schlippenbach got to know Schweizer in her trio with Kowald and Pierre Favre. “I have always liked her very much, because she is rhythmically immensely strong and a real jazz musician. I still like her today. We were always friends, Irène and I—maybe even more than with the others—but I wouldn’t say there was a private connection. I also knew Misha very well, and I especially appreciated him, also as a composer, and as a deep expert about all of jazz. I didn’t have as much of a connection with Fred. I knew him from many Wuppertal concerts, but I didn’t know him very well. Irène also had her circle in Zürich at that time, with a strong connection to the South Africans. She played with Louis Moholo, and before that with Makaya Ntshoko. I think Makaya was also a very important drummer for her. She knew Dudu Pukwana and played his compositions. That was at a time when I didn’t know her personally yet. I didn’t get to know her until a little later, when she got more into free improvisation. Recently she played with Makaya again. She’s kept in touch with her old South African friends.”

“There were other pianists then too, like Uli Gumpert or Urs Voerkel, who had two records on FMP,” adds Paul Lovens. “But Alex, Fred, and Irène were the main ones. And back then the Swiss label Intakt didn’t exist, so we’re just talking about FMP. Sisters, in-laws, relatives. Things were happening in Zürich too; the Workshop for Improvised Music already existed then.”

Revolution 1970: Incredibly Exhausting

“Jazz concert of the year,” the Lucerne paper Luzerner Tagblatt called a July 1970 Lucerne performance by the John Surman Trio with Stu Martin and Barre Phillips.

“In the second part of the evening, Irène Schweizer appeared as a guest, supporting the trio with her piano. At first she had some difficulty finding a way into the trio’s dense playing, but soon things were sounding quite like her on stage (though a bit quiet due to a weak amplifier). Actually, it would be wrong to rank the individual musicians here, because they gave us an indescribable evening, some of the best jazz ever to be heard in Lucerne (or anywhere nearby).”

Barre Phillips met Schweizer during the hectic tour of the then very popular Surman Trio: “I met Irène in Switzerland when I was playing with the trio, and we were traveling a lot. The drummer in the trio, Stu Martin, knew Pierre Favre very well already. So I met Pierre through Stu and of course, Pierre and Irène were hooked up. I do remember the young Irène on the scene and my being so impressed by the strength of this woman and her personality and her music. Not that she was aggressive in her personality at all. I’ve never seen Irène aggressive, but I can imagine she could be if the situation called for it.”

“Everything happened so fast in the 1960s,” Schweizer says. “First we had the Soul Jazz Trio, where we copied Junior Mance. Then there was the trio with Mani and Uli, where Paul Bley was our role model. The changes came fast; it was a crazy time. I was part of the power playing and politics of the Wuppertal scene for a while, and I thought it was good and important. The politics were always important to me, the aggressive playing with the elbows and the loudness and power were an expression of our revolutionary attitude at the time, but also the hammering on the piano was necessary so I could be heard. And also later with Rüdiger Carl, when he still played tenor saxophone and wanted to play as strongly and loudly as Brötzmann. In the beginning we played acoustically, there were no amplifiers, which means that, practically speaking, no one ever heard me, and I couldn’t hear myself either. That was always incredibly exhausting with this music, but that was how we wanted it then, there was nothing else for me. Playing beautiful trio music in the spirit of Bill Evans, that was behind me, and the free playing was important for me, but I was never as radical as Fred Van Hove, who still plays like that today. Misha and Han affected me quite differently from the way Brötzmann and Kowald did; they had a different message. It spoke to me more, and it was also much more convincing to me musically. Misha and Han were my role models as a duo. With Louis and Makaya it grooved, otherwise you didn’t play a regular rhythm back then. The bassists never played walking bass and there were no melodies. It was part of the time, the time of revolution. I wouldn’t really say it was fun, for me it was rather incredibly exhausting. We did our duty, so it seemed to me. We were contemporary. After skirts and blouses came jeans, short leather boots, and jean jackets in the early 1970s. The Germans always showed up with turtlenecks, leather jackets, and beards.”

Electric Rock Jazz 1970: Weblike Staccato Runs

Bruno Spoerri relates the story of an episode that Schweizer remembers only with reluctance: “In 1969, with Hans Kennel, I founded the first jazz-rock group in Switzerland, Jazz Rock Experience. We had a certain amount of commercial success with it. After we opened a show for Rahsaan Roland Kirk, we even got a manager. That was incredible at the time. The group was changing constantly; we had a new pianist every few months, and by the end of 1970 we wanted to get away from this pure jazz-rock and the Eddie Harris pieces we were playing. I wanted to play pieces by Frank Zappa and Michael Gibbs, things that were somewhere between jazz-rock and free—controlled freedom, so to speak, not just a free-for-all, but with a framework.”

“In 1969 we played at the Montreux Jazz Festival. In the radio competition we were chosen as the Swiss band, but the condition was that we were not allowed to come as an octet, but only as a group of six, so we had to kick two people out. At that time I’d discovered the electric saxophone through listening to Eddie Harris, and I’d started playing it. Eddie Harris was also at Montreux in 1969, which was an important event for me. And then we started to go a lot further with that mix, combining the Eddie Harris groove with free jazz elements, with irregular rhythms and things like that—that became the Jazz Rock Experience. After a year and a half of flying high, it all got out of hand.”

“In the end we took a radical step towards structured freedom, when Irène, Fredy Studer, and Christy Doran joined us. Now that was a crazy rhythm section. After a few months it fell apart. We’d opened up for Tony Williams, a terrible catastrophe, because we had to play using Tony Williams’s sound system. We weren’t familiar with this system and we couldn’t hear each other. That of course depressed our mood, and also these Zappa pieces were a bit more than we could handle. Tony Williams had walls of loudspeakers set up, it was ten times as loud as the loudest thing we’d ever experienced. I listened to the concert from way back in the dressing room and even from there it was still loud, insanely loud.”

“Once with Irène we were on a pop show on television for young people, we played a piece that sounded like ‘Bitches Brew.’ Maybe she doesn’t want to remember it now, but she was actually very good. She preferred to play free, but I didn’t like that so much.”

Schweizer looks back with great skepticism: “The electric phase wasn’t my thing, anyway. Fredy Studer talked me into playing an electric piano once. I’ve actually repressed that. Somehow in a pub, where there was also a music room, we gave a concert on a Sunday afternoon where I played electric piano, a jazz-rock mix. It was terrible, I never wanted that and I never bought an electric piano.”

Fredy Studer came from rock and did not know Schweizer at first. “Jazz came later. In Lucerne there was a bar called Rio, with a jukebox that played beat and rock records, and the audience to match. One day, a concert was announced by some crazy Schweizer Trio, playing free jazz. Somehow it found its way into this underground rock scene, and we went to hear it. That was Irène’s trio with Uli Trepte and Mani Neumeier, and it blew us away. We were thrilled. Even if the music was formally unfamiliar to us, it had the right spirit. To us it sounded like a kind of abstract rock and roll. So we were excited. That was my first jazz concert. Then I heard her trio with Pierre Favre and Peter Kowald, and Willisau of course became very important.”

“At that time Irène was living in Sursee and I was living with my girlfriend in Nottwil, where I took over Pierre Favre’s job at Paiste. Pierre moved away and Irène would come by two or three times a week, for about two, three years. Sometimes we also visited her at her home in Sursee, and I still remember very well when Bitches Brew came out, Irène listened to that record like crazy for months. She had that album before I did, and she was extremely enthusiastic about it, until she decided to go another way. We also had some concerts with Irène, with the band Jazz Rock Experience, with Bruno Spoerri and Hans Kennel. Soon that got too predictable for me, and I involuntarily blew up the band. After that I played a few loose concerts with Christy Doran and some others, with Irène on Fender Rhodes, as a support act for Tony Williams’s Lifetime, in Zürich and Basel. Tony blew my mind—that was when I saw him live for the first time. Then we had some gigs with Irène in Lucerne, a kind of open mix of jazz-rock and free jazz. Later we went our separate ways musically, but of course I’ve always followed what she was up to, and we’ve stayed in touch. Sometimes I’ll go for years without seeing her, but I always keep up with what she’s doing musically.”

In November 1970, eleven jazz concerts took place in Lucerne over five days. The December 1st edition of the Luzerner Tagblatt reported: “The most interesting concert took place on Saturday afternoon in the Stadtkeller, featuring the electric piano of Irène Schweizer, who joined forces with three young Lucerne musicians to form the Electric Rock Jazz Group. Irène Schweizer set the course, with more emphasis on rhythm than before, but still committed to the structural webs of staccato runs of her time with Pierre Favre.” The group had Christy Doran, Fredy Studer, and Klaus Thalmann, and a disastrous amplification system “which was often left to one side, emitting a general noise.” But the highlight was the Pierre Favre Group, with Gerd Dudek, Beb Guérin, and Schweizer, “who played with them here for the last time.” The breakup was seen as a regrettable loss of “one of the best ensembles there is, but making space for new possibilities and combinations.”

“All in all, it was overwhelming,” says Bruno Spoerri. “I had a family with three children, I was working day and night for the film company, and at the same time I opened a recording studio. Then, with Hans Kennel, I founded a music production company, producing Swiss musicians. I worked as a sound engineer, and, as a composer, I was fully involved in electronic music. It was just too much. So at the end of 1970, beginning of 1971, everything fell apart.”

“There’s a lot of electronic music in our field today,” says Schweizer, “but I don’t do it. I still play acoustic grand pianos. I’ve never been involved in electronic experiments, except for when I tried electric piano very briefly in the 1970s. I’m not interested in it. It’s like in the seventies, when a triad, a normal note, was forbidden, everything had to sound like noise. When I hear it now, coming from younger electronic musicians, I hear the statement this music makes as frustrating.”

Willisau 1970/1971: The Musicians Took Off

In the early Willisau years, Schweizer reports, she played one or two concerts in Willisau every three months. “Back then it was in the Mohren Hotel, an older hotel with a music hall that held two or three hundred people; that’s where all the concerts took place. Troxler didn’t know much about the music back then, so I told him about the English scene, Chris McGregor and Harry Miller, Evan Parker and Trevor Watts. I gave him tips about the musicians I knew from my time in England. Alex von Schlippenbach also came to Willisau around then. I let Troxler know about many people. Word got around, and then of course the other musicians started contacting him themselves. Sometimes he’d ask me, ‘Hey, this person contacted me, who is that?’ and I’d say ‘You have to give them a gig, that’s important.’ Later