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This music is the music of the hidden force of the universe

– Louis Moholo

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

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

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

Childhood in the Landhaus: The Innkeeper’s Daughter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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