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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.”