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.