in this way put her music outside the prejudices of the jazz community. Some of her ‘old’ jazz friends might then be able to approach her music with a bit more tolerance.”
On September 22, 1967, the Lucerne paper Luzerner Neuste Nachrichten reported on a concert by the Irène Schweizer Trio with saxophonist Barney Wilen in the Telecafé. This was the first free jazz concert in the concert series of the Lucerne chapter of the Musical Youth of Switzerland [Jeunesses Musicales de Suisse, JML], otherwise dedicated mostly to classical music and organized by Mani Planzer. The article says that many who came to hear melodic jazz were at first disappointed. But despite a substantial delay in starting the concert and a malfunctioning amplifier, by the end the real jazz fans were “completely delighted”: “The audience? Well, as usual, at first they were very reserved. Timid applause or an interjection here and there. But then they were electrified by the rhythms. They thawed out and gave energy to the artists.” Mani Neumeier told the newspaper that the trio played from graphic scores, partly from memory, but always expressing the mood they were in: “The pianist attacks the piano with the backs of her hands and fists when she has to, when that’s her mood. Everything is done with the aim of making the inner feeling outwardly visible.”
Schweizer says there were always two camps in the clubs, “people who liked it and others who rejected us. They often walked out of the concerts. We were attacked: ‘There’s no rhyme or reason to it. We can’t tell what you’re trying to do!’ The trio with Neumeier and Trepte accompanied Yusef Lateef at the first Montreux Festival in 1967. An agent brought us together. We were his backup band. We played a kind of free music with him, but always tonal. A bit like Coltrane; modal. The interplay worked really well. I thought Lateef was wonderful, and I think he also had fun playing with us. After Montreux we went to Germany for a few club gigs.” (Jazzthetik 7 + 8, 2006, p. 40).
Donaueschingen Music Days 1967: Jazz Meets India
In the fall, the trio performed at the Donaueschingen Festival of Contemporary Music. On October 21st, at 4 PM, the SWF Jazz Meets India session took place, featuring the Dewan Motihar Trio, the Irène Schweizer Trio, and Barney Wilen and Manfred Schoof. Shortly afterwards, Schweizer performed the same program at the Berlin Jazz Days. In the liner notes to the LP Jazz Meets India, producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt wrote: “A jazz trio and an Indian trio meet face to face. Here jazz isn’t made into a counterfeit Indian music, nor is Indian music falsely assimilated to jazz. They aren’t meeting in some abstract, uninhabitable no-man’s-land. But precisely for this reason, it’s so surprising to hear how musicians from two cultures so distant from each other communicate musically in a meaningful way.”
Manfred Schoof: “When I met Irène, she had an ongoing trio with Neumeier and Trepte. Our cooperation in a way symbolized the formation of a European community. First there was the Schoof Quintet, the Brötzmann Trio, and Gunter Hampel. These were the beginnings of free jazz in Germany, and then it slowly began to spread, but then also independently sprang up in other countries. I played with Irène for the first time in a television production by Joachim-Ernst Berendt for German radio, the SWR in Baden-Baden. After that we played together many times, and then came the big moment where I played with Irène and Barney Wilen and Indian musicians who lived in London, in a fixed group. Berendt had organized Jazz Meets India, it was free improvisation, and we adapted what we were doing to Indian music, and Irène did it incredibly well.”
Mani Neumeier remembers Jazz Meets India well, though he does not consider it one of the trio’s greatest achievements: “Joachim-Ernst Berendt had asked me two years earlier if I had any connections to Indian musicians. So I got them for him. He wanted our trio, plus two good soloists, Barney Wilen and Manfred Schoof—I would have preferred Don Cherry—and three Indian musicians who played traditional instruments like sitar, tabla, and tambura. It was an experiment that succeeded because we met each other halfway. But our trio alone was much better. I still think the FMP record Early Tapes is great.”
Isolde Schaad says of the 1967 Donaueschingen festival: “I was a very young journalist and went there with a photographer friend of mine, and in the women’s magazine annabelle I reported on Irène’s sensational appearance, with some very nice photos. That’s when I wrote the first bigger profile of Irène. She got in touch with me and thanked me, and so we got to know each other personally. Anyway, it was a crazy thing back then, a free jazz pianist at Donaueschingen. And from then on her star kept on rising.”
On the occasion of the first and last public concert of the Irène Schweizer Trio in Zürich, at the beginning of 1968 at the Museum of Decorative Arts, there was speculation about the imminent breakup of the band. “The reason for the breakup is the usual one in jazz: they have gotten so familiar with each other that they sense danger for their individual development. The Irène Schweizer Trio is ending its career at a time when they’ve begun to garner international recognition: last year the group performed at the Donaueschingen Festival and the Berlin Jazz Days.” The group gave their final concert under the name “The Amazing Free Rock Band,” with guests Barney Wilen and the Swiss rock guitarist Walt Anselmo. “‘You could dance to this music,’ Neumeier predicts, ‘and we’re going to ask the audience to do just that. And for some pieces we’re going to use two spotlights instead of the normal lighting in the hall.’” (Neue Presse Zürich, January 25, 1968). Says Schweizer: “At some point I had had enough of the trio. I was getting annoyed with Mani because he wanted to get more famous, and then with Guru-Guru he went more and more in the direction of rock. Jazz interested him less and less, and Uli just went along with the flow.”
EXCURSUS Booze and Drugs: Till You Drop
The drinking exploits of her male colleagues annoyed Schweizer from the beginning. She often went along with them, but was mostly bored. “Mani liked to drink a beer from time to time, but he and Uli weren’t drunks. I first encountered that with Rüdiger, Brötzmann, and Kowald. The amount they’d drink, night after night, I’d never seen that before. I thought it was awful, hanging out every night in the bars after playing—this was in Wuppertal. It never stopped. The bars didn’t close because there were exceptions to the regulations in Wuppertal, so they could stay until four in the morning and keep drinking until they fell over. I mostly stayed with Rüdiger, so I’d go with him after the gig, otherwise I would have had to go to his house alone. Sometimes Christa, Brötzmann’s wife, took me with her. But otherwise we usually hung around all night. I’d drink two glasses of wine and maybe a Ramazotti and wait until the men were done drinking. It was terrible, really. I didn’t understand how they could be in any kind of shape the next day. It was always a mystery to me, how they stood it.”
Neumeier recalls: “Irène liked to drink a glass of wine once in a while, nothing excessive. Uli and I smoked weed, Irène used to say she got stoned just being around us. So, weed instead of alcohol. LSD came much later.”
“Drugs weren’t such a big thing with us,” says Schweizer. “Mani was a pothead and Uli was too, to some extent. They were always smoking in the Africana. Sometimes they’d say to me, ‘come on, have a hit before we play,’ but I never wanted to do that. Sometimes I thought it was too bad that Mani always smoked before playing, because he always thought we played so well. I felt like I had to do everything myself. He’d be high and would have a completely different view of the music.”
Pierre Favre says that, for Irène and him, drugs were never important: “The two of us were never into that. When I was in Munich my colleagues smoked a lot; they liked to get high. I just enjoy playing so much, I never liked that, and neither did Irène.”
“The heavy drinking Irène’s talking about, you can’t imagine how far it went,” Brötzmann says. “It really got on her nerves, but my wife took care of Irène. Anyway, if you ask Bennink or anyone, she was the soul of the whole Wuppertal scene.”
Brötzmann’s wife Christa was totally independent, says Schweizer. “She was such a good woman; she did a good job raising their two children, really a kind of saint, while Brötzmann was just running around drinking. I have no idea what kind of marriage they had, but anyway it’s none of my business. I was often invited to dinner at their place. Christa cooked. Rüdiger had lived with Konstanze in Berlin for a while, and later lived in Wuppertal with Hans Reichel. They lived together