Irène Schweizer (1941 - 2024)

Photo by Peter Gannushkin

By Martin Schray

A man’s shirt and a pack of cigarettes - that was the prize for the 16-year-old winner of a Zurich amateur jazz festival in 1957. That a woman could win the competition was simply unthinkable for the organizers at the time. When Irène Schweizer entered the world’s jazz stages, times were still different - especially for women.

Irène Schweizer was born June 2, 1941 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. She grew up in a pub owner’s family in her home town and after her first attempts on the accordion she discovered the piano and the drums and joined the Crazy Stokers, a Dixieland band, at the age of 16. In 1957, that alone was a sensation. Shortly after that she landed in the top ranks at the aforementioned Zurich Amateur Jazz Festival playing soul jazz and hardbop. One might image how the jaws of many men in the audience dropped when they heard her play.

A little later, Schweizer attended a language school in Great Britain, where she immersed herself in the London jazz scene (mainly Ronnie Scott’s club), before returning to Zurich. At the “Africana“ jazz club she met drummer Mani Neumeier and bassist Uli Trepte, who also formed her first trio. When the two men converted to rock music in 1968, Schweizer’s long-time collaboration with drummer Pierre Favre began. Their music sounded increasingly wild and free, which earned the pianist invitations to the Total Music Meeting in Berlin - the annual pilgrimage site for free jazz fans, which was organized by the FMP people around Jost Gebers. As a woman, however, she was on her own and had to assert herself against the male alpha dogs, which resulted in her more playful, sensitive style. Nevertheless, she managed to prevail, an incredible personal and musical achievement that cannot be overstated in retrospect.

Since that time Schweizer was a regular guest on the avant-garde stages in Berlin, Willisau, Chicago and New York, she has played with Don Cherry, Louis Moholo, Hamid Drake, Andrew Cyrille and George Lewis, her solo performances show her as a leading pianist of European jazz. In the last years of her career, she was finally deemed worthy of playing in the temples of high culture, a late triumph.

Schweizer, unlike other jazz musicians, has not recorded for many different labels; almost her entire oeuvre is available on FMP and Intakt. However, her debut Santana with Pierre Favre on drums and Peter Kowald on bass was released on Pip in 1969 before Jost Gebers reissued it on FMP in 1979. More classics are her two FMP recordings with Rüdiger Carl (sax, clarinets) and Louis Moholo (drums): Messer (1976) and Tuned Boots (1978). Her solo recordings Wilde Senoritas (FMP, 1977) and Hexensabbat (FMP, 1978). Since the mid-1980s she has recorded almost exclusively for the Swiss label Intakt, and although these recordings no longer have the power and energy of the early recordings, her duo with Louis Moholo Irène Schweizer & Louis Moholo (1987) and Where's Africa with Omi Ziegel (saxophone, vocals) are truly excellent albums.

In the last years of her life Irène Schweizer lived in a retirement home, she could no longer perform. But anyone who saw her at her last performances, such as in 2017 at the Neumarkt Theater in Zurich with Louis Moholo-Moholo, and how much joy she exuded in playing even at an advanced age, and how she was celebrated by her - predominantly female - fans, can guess what a loss she is to the free jazz community.

Watch her solo at a festival in her hometown Schaffhausen in 2008: