Parker also remembers Kowald as a tireless networker: “Peter Kowald was the man that introduced me to Brötzmann. That led to everything in Germany and Holland, because through Brötzmann, I met Han Bennink and Misha and Willem Breuker, so then was immediately in the heart of things in Europe. Back then, Kowald was living in Antwerp, when I first went over to visit, and then he moved. I don’t know if he moved directly from there to Switzerland, but he certainly made a gesture of ‘I want to play with these people.’ I probably was the first saxophonist they used and later on, they invited Trevor Watts to be part of it. But Kowald was the key to a lot of things. As you pick your way through the history, you’ll find his name crops up a lot, because he was prepared to move around. As maybe the premiere networker out of the whole scene, he introduced a lot of people to one another, so it was through him I was invited to be in that, when it was a quartet. Kowald introduced me to Manfred Eicher, another key person. A couple of years before, there was the label ECM. And then there was this extraordinary Peter Brötzmann record produced by Manfred Eicher. Manfred did a few independent productions before he started ECM, and that was a very, very strange mixture of personalities and musical approaches, aesthetics, sensibilities, all of those things. It’s a historical fact.”
Asked about the most important stages in his musical development, Peter Kowald told author Bert Noglik, in his book Jazz-Werkstatt International 1980: “I wanted to play with other musicians for a while. That’s why I went to Switzerland in 1969, where I played mainly in a trio with Pierre Favre and Irène Schweizer. Occasionally Evan Parker joined us” (p. 455). There weren’t too many musicians working in this area at the time, Kowald says. “The people we were in contact with back then were mainly Irène Schweizer, Mani Neumeier, and Pierre Favre in Switzerland; John Stevens, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, and Paul Rutherford in England; and Han Bennink, Misha Mengelberg, and Willem Breuker in the Netherlands” (Ibid).
Willisau: Radical and Shocking
On February 13, 1968, Irène Schweizer, George Mraz, and Pierre Favre played the Kreuzstube in Willisau. On this occasion, Schweizer’s first performance in Willisau, the audience was reportedly shocked by the radical music, but Troxler was enthusiastic about it. (Meinrad Buholzer. Jazz in Willisau. Wie Niklaus Troxler den Free Jazz nach Willisau brachte [Jazz in Willisau. How Niklaus Troxler Brought Free Jazz to Willisau], p. 11). Niklaus Troxler had met Schweizer in 1968: “I had met Pierre Favre not long before that in Lucerne, where he played with Mal Waldron in the Kleintheater. I was just getting fascinated by free jazz, and Pierre told me about a new trio he was planning, the Pierre Favre Trio, with Irène and George Mráz. That was the beginning of my history with Irène and Pierre, which became like a magnet for me, because later they also played with other musicians like Trevor Watts. But that was Irène’s doing. She had been in London in the early 1960s; she had connections in the London scene and she made a lot of things happen. It was called the Pierre Favre Trio, but it was really co-led by Irène and Pierre.”
“At the end of the 1960s there was a lot of political activity in Lucerne, but not in Willisau. Lucerne was a different scene from Zürich; there was a young left-wing movement, almost what we’d call Autonomists now. They protested a lot and things were happening there that I experienced. Some of them also came to the concerts. At that time a creative kind of rock music was coming up, and after the free jazz concerts we’d always go to this dive bar in an old barn and listen to that music—Ten Years After and Jefferson Airplane—and dance to it. Irène and Peter Kowald came along too. The concerts were in the hall of what used to be the Hotel Kreuz, which is gone now. Earlier I had organized blues concerts. We had more people at those. At the free jazz concerts, at the beginning there would be a hundred people and at the end there’d be twenty. That was pretty tough. I liked blues and free jazz, but the audience didn’t; there was a total split. I decided to devote myself to the new music. In 1969, blues musicians like Champion Jack Dupree and Eddie Boyd and Irène played with Evan Parker in concerts I put on. That wasn’t going to work for long, but it was very interesting. Guest musicians like Evan Parker stayed with Pierre in Sursee, others traveled further or stayed in the Hotel Kreuz, or later in the Mohren. Nowadays the musicians stay in Sursee, because I prefer to have most of them stay in one big hotel—it’s easier to pick them up that way. It’s twelve kilometers to Willisau. They go from the airport to the hotel, from the hotel to the stage, and back again.”
Pierre Favre Trio 1969: Berlin was the Center
For the recording of Santana, the trio had hardly any money and only one and a half hours of studio time, Pierre Favre recalls. “Play what you can and voilá, that was Santana. It had to happen fast, because our funds were very limited. We rented the studio of a good friend and made this record. First, we produced it privately in 1969 and sold it at concerts. Then FMP made a second edition. Berlin was the center for this music at that time. Paris was completely different, and Italy was something else again. The recordings were made with absolutely no discussion ahead of time. We just played and it worked. Later Evan Parker joined us. That was the quartet. We traveled a lot with that group also. But we never talked about the music, we just played.”
Evan Parker remembers his first concerts with Schweizer and Favre: “I remember 1969; it was the Pierre Favre Quartet formerly. It was basically a kind of thing we called a grace-and-favors type job. At a time when Pierre himself was overseeing the quality control for the Paiste Cymbal Company, Irène was his secretary. She takes everything pretty seriously. We played quite a few of the festivals because Pierre always had good connections. He was very well established and he knew a lot of the Paris-placed musicians because he’d work there. So through Pierre, we had contacts. It was totally free playing. We never discussed anything. We just played, and it worked very well.”
“The hall is full, the audience in turtleneck sweaters,” reported the Tages-Anzeiger in early 1969, describing a concert evening at the Radio Studio Zürich. “Free jazz, the revolution against the formulas of commercial jazz. Ecstasy with an intellectual impact. Unfortunately the drummer (Pierre Favre) is mostly too loud, and confuses rhythm with noise. The pianist (Irène Schweizer) is constantly injecting Webern-esque sounds into the mix, but her contribution is often drowned out. The saxophonist (Evan Parker) whimpers sporadically, the double bassist’s (Peter Kowald) bow loses hair in clumps. From my notes: ‘Pigs dying in a hail of bullets.’” (Tages-Anzeiger, February 26, 1969).
Berlin 1969: Young Irène on the Scene
Beginning with the first Total Music Meeting in 1968, whose aim was to provide an alternative, musically and in terms of cultural politics, and continuing until the Berlin Jazz Days, the Berlin jazz scene was institutionally divided. In his 1969 report on the Berlin Jazz Days, journalist Rolf Ulrich Kaiser wrote: “This jazz no longer has anything to do with ‘social criticism.’ It has become refined entertainment.” Another criticism was that “the young generation of today’s working musicians” was ignored. In contrast, at the second FMP Total Music Meeting “twenty free jazz players met in the Berlin bar Litfass. In groups around Brötzmann, Schoof, and Irène Schweizer, one heard ravishing, gripping, committed sounds, which however fit better in a dark bar than in a comfortable concert hall. These ‘Berlin Jazz Days’ unmistakably demonstrated the gap between ‘entertainment jazz’ and contemporary jazz.”
EXCURSUS FMP 1969 – The Beginnings: I Was Still Young
“I think I first heard Irène on Jazz Meets India in 1967,” says Jost Gebers who, together with Peter Brötzmann, founded the influential Berlin label Free Music Production (FMP) in 1969. FMP gave Irène Schweizer and the musicians of the European free jazz scene their earliest opportunity to document the development of their music. Jost Gebers remembers the beginnings: “A year or two later, in late summer, I went to Nottwil in Switzerland with Brötzmann. Irène was living there at the time. But actually we were there because of Peter Kowald, who was also living there. And they had this trio with Favre, sometimes as a quartet with Evan. That was the situation when we started FMP, and we decided that they should play at the second Total Music Meeting in 1969. Then our collaboration with Irène started somehow. At some point the trio no longer existed, but there was a short-lived quartet with Favre, Irène, Trevor Watts, and Jürg Grau, a Swiss trumpeter. But that didn’t last either. They also played one of our events once, I think in a workshop. Then Irène