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