Of great significance for [Irène] Schweizer were her encounters with the music of South African exiles, including The Blue Notes, a group whose line-up included many of South Africa’s foremost improvisors, such as alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, tenor saxophonist Nikele Moyake, trumpeter and flautist Mongezi Feza, pianist Chris McGregor, bassist Johnny Dyani and drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo, and the trio of pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahim, or, as he was known then, Dollar Brand. Born in 1934 in Cape Town, and classified under apartheid racial laws as a ‘Coloured’ person, Ibrahim co-founded The Jazz Epistles in 1959, arguably South Africa’s most influential ensemble in the bebop idiom. In the words of scholar John Edwin Mason, The Jazz Epistles, which included saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, trumpeter Hugh Masekela, trombonist Jonas Gwangwa, double bassist Johnny Gertze and drummer Makaya Ntshoko, were “engaged in a kind of cultural guerilla [sic] warfare against the laws, values, and expectations of the apartheid state”. In the wake of the March 1960 Sharpeville massacre, in which 69 people were killed and almost 200 were wounded by the police, authorities “progressively shut down racially integrated nightclubs and enforced statutes which prohibited both black musicians from playing before white audiences and musicians of different races from performing together”. After the breakup of The Jazz Epistles, Ibrahim and his partner, vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin, went into exile in Europe in February 1962 and settled in Zurich, where his trio, with Gertze and Ntshoko, held an extended residency at the Café Africana between 1962 and 1965. In 1963, Benjamin persuaded Duke Ellington, who was on tour in Europe, to attend a performance of Ibrahim’s trio at the Africana. Impressed by what he heard, Ellington produced Ibrahim’s debut album, Duke Ellington Presents The Dollar Brand Trio, in the same year in Paris.

Schweizer recalls being deeply affected by Ibrahim’s music:

I was fascinated by Dollar Brand’s pieces, by his entirely different style. For me, it was rhythmically and harmonically a different style in jazz, not how I already knew it. The phrasing was different. For me, it was like a hymn. That’s how everything always sounded and the pieces were incredibly beautiful. I often had tears in my eyes because it was so beautiful. (laughs)

Following a performance at the Antibes Jazz Festival in July 1964, The Blue Notes also held an extended residency at the Café Africana. According to ethnomusicologist Carol Muller, “The Blue Notes found themselves stranded on the beach at the end of the event” and “called Abdullah and Benjamin who arranged for the group to stay in the basement of their student house in Zurich”. As scholar Salim Washington noted, The Blue Notes were “considered a mixed race group, and hence illegal” due to its sole white member and leader Chris McGregor. Thus, the band “played mostly in the black townships, as far from the surveillance of the state as possible”. As Washington has stated, “In order to play the music that they loved, the Blue Notes faced potential arrest, death threats, and the indignities of preparing skits in which they would pretend that Chris was a baas travelling with his ‘boys’ in order to avoid police prosecution.”

For Schweizer, being able to experience The Blue Notes at the Café Africana night after night was an “incredible experience”. As Schweizer remembers the transformative impact The Blue Notes’ performances had on her: “That was something entirely new for me, that you could play such beautiful songs, this kwela music, these beautiful African songs, so vigorously with such power. […] For me, it was once again almost a shock and influenced me greatly.” Schweizer and her trio frequently performed with the South African exiles in the context of jam sessions at the Café Africana. As Schweizer has recalled: “We often played together in the basement at the Africana and The Blue Notes were also very nice with us. Louis [Moholo-Moholo], Dudu [Pukwana] and Mongezi [Feza] frequently listened to us when we played. We were very impressed with what the others were doing and vice versa, as well.” (laughs)

These interactions spawned a series of significant collaborations between Schweizer and respectively Dyani, Moholo-Moholo and Ntshoko, which began between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s. For instance, in 1969, Schweizer joined US alto saxophonist Robin Kenyatta’s sextet, which included Dyani, Brötzmann, Kowald and Swiss drummer and percussionist Pierre Favre. In March 1971, Schweizer and Ntshoko performed in Willisau, Switzerland alongside Swiss double bassist Peter K Frey and trumpeter and guitarist Jürg Grau. Schweizer and Moholo-Moholo began collaborating in 1974, when the drummer replaced Heinrich Hock in the newly founded quartet co-led by Schweizer and German saxophonist Rüdiger Carl. As Schweizer has noted in this regard: “The connection with black musicians was always important to me. And I’m actually incredibly proud that the black musicians play with me because that is not a given. That black and white are in a band, nowadays that is no longer an issue, but back then it wasn’t yet quite that normal at that time.” For Schweizer, her engagement with African diasporic musicians proved instrumental for her own politicisation, which set in around 1968, a year of social upheaval across Europe that also witnessed Zurich’s Globuskrawall. Taking place on June 29, 1968, the Globuskrawall was a student protest, set off by the city council’s decision to not make a vacant building available as a youth centre. As Schweizer recalls:

Through the music and my acquaintance with black musicians, I stumbled upon the discrimination against black people, and the Black Panther movement. That interested me more than Swiss politics. The magazine Down Beat was an authentic source of information for me. And I read the book Soul On Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. When I heard The Archie Shepp Quintet in Donaueschingen in 1967, the black musicians were an incredible experience for me, their expressivity, and their aggressiveness too, but in a positive way. They didn’t just fight for a new music, free jazz, but also against racial discrimination in the US. That gave them enormous power. This sense of black musicians wholeheartedly standing up for something shaped my subsequent development as a musician.

By the mid-1960s, Schweizer and her trio had begun to disengage from formative principles, such as functional chord progressions and continuous meter, that had defined jazz practices by and large until the late 1950s. As Schweizer recalls about this decisive shift, which occurred during a 1965 rehearsal: “Without coordinating, it suddenly went on freely without tempo, thus without continuous beat and without harmony. Suddenly we noticed, ah, we freed ourselves wholly organically without coordinating it. Suddenly we were in the free world.” (laughs)

By the mid-1960s, Schweizer had also established connections with some of the leading German improvisors, such as Brötzmann, Kowald and Schoof, with whom she began to collaborate, participating in several concerts organised by the New Jazz Artists’ Guild. As Brötzmann recalls:

We invited her to Wuppertal. For a while I also played with Neumeier and then there were these opportunities, such as Radio Bremen for instance, so that all of us could get together there. We were arguably the first who got Irène out of Switzerland. […] I mostly played with Fred Van Hove but Irène was definitely always my favourite pianist, which she actually still is.

Through the help of Brötzmann and Kowald, in May 1966, Schweizer’s trio performed at the German Jazz Festival in Frankfurt where, as with Brötzmann’s trio, the group was confronted with charges of faking it. A review in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit stated flatly that The Schweizer Trio’s performance “fluctuated between technical inaptitude and fraud”. Following a performance at the important International Jazz Festival in Comblain-la-Tour in August 1966, in January of the following year, Schweizer made recordings that were originally produced by the Munich based music publisher Hans Wewerka, but were only released in 1978 by Free Music Production’s head Jost Gebers as Early Tapes.

By 1967, Schweizer had met Pierre Favre and joined the drummer’s trio, which included Czech-born double bassist George Mraz, the following year. When Mraz decided to emigrate to the US in the wake of the Warsaw Pact armies’ invasion of Czechoslovakia and the suppression of Prague Spring, Peter Kowald became the double bassist for the trio, which was occasionally augmented by Evan Parker. In 1969, The Favre Trio performed at the second Total Music Meeting.

According to Swiss visual artist Bignia Corradini, who met Schweizer during the early 1970s, the blossoming Women’s Liberation Movement slowly began to afflict the event’s demographics in terms of a gender balance:

Back then, I listened to a lot of jazz, had various contacts with the scene. And, of course, we went to the FMP concerts. Those were important events back then. The stronger the Women’s Movement became, the more women from Zurich went to the concerts in Berlin. I remember that at one time I cooked for ten women, who visited Irène in our apartment prior to her performance.

As one of the only two female instrumentalists associated with the European jazz experimentalism movement who were active during the latter half of the 1960s, Schweizer’s presence as a lesbian woman on a predominantly male scene quite often proved challenging in several regards. As Julie Dawn Smith has remarked about both the “free jazz” and the free improvisation communities’ failure to face the salient issue of gender inequality squarely:

Neither free improvisation nor free jazz, however, extended their critiques to include the aesthetic, economic, or political liberation of women. For the most part, a practice of freedom that resisted gender oppression and oppression on the basis of sexual difference was excluded from the liberatory impulses of male-dominated improvising communities. The opportunity for freedom in relation to sexual difference, gender, and sexuality for women improvisors was strangely absent from the discourses and practices of both free jazz and free improvisation.

Schweizer’s attendance at the Vierte Kongress für Fraueninteressen (Fourth Congress for Women’s Interests) in Bern got her “politicised as a lesbian” and brought about her activism in the Swiss and European Women’s Liberation and Gay and Lesbian Movements. However, it wasn’t until the latter half of the 1970s that Schweizer had an opportunity to work with all-female ensembles, among them the important Feminist Improvising Group, which she joined in 1978. As Schweizer has recalled, the contrast she experienced between performing with all-female ensembles during the latter half of the 1970s and being the only woman in almost exclusively male contexts during the 1960s and early to mid-1970s could not have been starker:

I always said: ‘Where are the women? There must be…’ Well, there were a few in America: Carla Bley, and there was Melba Liston, a trombonist. There were a few back then, but I had no connection with them. But in Europe, I always thought: where are all the women? And then it began during the latter half of the 1970s when the Women’s Movement arose in Europe, as well. In Switzerland, there were all of a sudden women’s music groups too, all-female music groups. I was in one of them as well and I began to work with female musicians for the first time. And for me, that was like night and day but not like night in day in a negative sense. It was a completely different experience because I suffered now and then, always with those men. Some of them were even pretty hardcore, too. The whole thing how they acted. Actually, they always behaved decently towards me but I experienced things and, of course, I noticed how they treated women on stage or after the concert. There were time and again inappropriate moments and it didn’t suit me. But what was I supposed to do? I was alone. I was alone and I think that is why I became so strong. I had to fight.

European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism In Germany, 1950–1975 will be published in English on 20 May by Wolke Verlag.