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,