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”
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