This Uncontainable Feeling of Freedom

Crazy Stokers, March 1957: Werner Lempen, trombone; Rolf Oechslin, alto saxophone; Irène Schweizer, piano; Ruedi Lempen, trumpet; Charly Speichinger, clarinet; Paul Rodel, banjo; Dino Corchia, bass. Not visible: Herbie Velder, drums.

Schaffhausen: The Step Across the Tracks

Already as an 18-year-old, Schweizer fled the narrow conservatism of her hometown. She never returned to Schaffhausen: “The old city here, especially, is nothing but a backdrop, beautifully made up and clean. Always so clean. You hardly see anyone on the street. It’s incredibly quiet and everything is beautiful. The Bureau of Tourism calls Schaffhausen ‘The Little Paradise.’ I wanted to go out into the wide world. Here everyone knows everyone; when you went around the old city, you knew everyone you saw. It was just a hick town. But today I enjoy going back, it’s a nice city, with the Rhine, good shops, good restaurants, and some things are happening culturally.”

Writer and journalist Isolde Schaad, born in Schaffhausen in 1944, remembers hearing talk of a brilliant pianist who played at the inn. “She grew up in the inn, the innkeeper’s daughter, and she started playing there when she was quite a young girl. When I went to high school, we had only heard about her playing. At that time we hadn’t made this step across the tracks. It was like another world. And it wasn’t possible to just go there, because there weren’t any formal performances, it was just the daughter of the house who played there. She’s a few years older than I am, and I have to say that in the 1950s and 1960s Schaffhausen was really a town of strict class differences. Irène was from the working-class part of town, and I was part of the middle class. We really had no contact. I never personally met her in Schaffhausen, only later in Zürich. The petty-bourgeois establishment didn’t want to have anything to do with this wild music. But I was about to enter my wild years; I was already something of a rebel then, but I passed my university qualifying exam and went to Zürich to study. There she played in the jazz club Africana, where internationally known musicians were already appearing. Those included expatriate South Africans like Abdullah Ibrahim, who was still going by the name Dollar Brand then, and this young woman. They sat down and just played. They say that the prophet has to be recognized abroad before being appreciated at home. That’s an old pattern, and especially with this wild music it took time for it to happen.”

The founder and director of the Schaffhausen Jazz Festival, Urs Röllin, first saw Schweizer playing with Pierre Favre in the Kammgarn. “It really made an impression on me. I almost couldn’t believe that she was from Schaffhausen. At that time I was in my early twenties, the Kammgarn was full, and I couldn’t make head or tail of free improvisation. In those days I was still listening to Led Zeppelin. I was at the concert with my girlfriend at the time and when, on a Sunday, we were invited to lunch at her parents’ place, I told them about this concert. My girlfriend came from a very musical family, and when I told them about Irène Schweizer her mother said ‘yes, we lived next to her upstairs.’ The mother was an organist in the church and was musically very talented, but then she added ‘but Irène can’t play piano. She always practiced the same thing, hundreds of times. I could’ve played it after playing through it once or twice. But she would practice the same passage over and over, I didn’t understand it.’ That was my first encounter with Irène Schweizer. I didn’t understand the mother’s criticism at all. I myself practiced guitar like that; I learned blues solos by ear and repeated them hundreds of times. When she said that I knew these were two different worlds.”

“That repressed attitude is also typical for Schaffhausen. Classical musicians who just go to their music lessons don’t understand when someone repeats the same piece hundreds of times. But working on nuances is actually the key to music. Sometimes you sense that Irène is concealing something, that she doesn’t want to be noticed. But when she is with other musicians, she’s completely different. Maybe Irène doesn’t want to be recognized on the street, but in the important places, people know who she is. It’s really a great development that neither the city nor the canton, nor the people who have to do with culture, have the slightest doubt that she has made a truly great career. Irène was already well known; even in Schaffhausen she won prizes. But of course there were also people in Schaffhausen who made fun of her a little bit, envied her, didn’t want to understand.”

“In Zürich, on the other hand, there’s often this cutting tone, ‘we’re the real thing.’ That’s why I can actually understand that even though she’s lived in Zürich for a long time, she’s remained a woman from Schaffhausen. She still speaks Schaffhausen German—I see that as her way of expressing pride that she’s from Schaffhausen. Even if she’s happy to have gotten out. Anyway, it’s too narrow there for someone who doesn’t want to have a regular job and that kind of environment. When I came back from Los Angeles, Zürich felt like just as much of a backwater as Schaffhausen.”

“As a woman, as a musician, she’s accomplished so much. She grew up in Schaffhausen, had a job, and came to free jazz fairly late, but then changed that world in such a concentrated way, as well as the Women’s Movement, when she came out. For her it’s a matter of course; she’s so convincing about it. For her it’s completely normal, nothing special, and she also doesn’t think that now she has to play everywhere. That might also be a bit of a Schaffhausen mentality. One wants to get away from the narrow anxiety of that town, while also being proud of your home. The very direct manner that people prize in Zürich, we don’t like that so much. There’s this reserved character that I know from Schaffhausen. People are self-assured, they do what they want to, but they don’t really want to make a big deal about it, it’s more ‘yeah, I’m here.’ In what I do, sometimes I have the feeling that I’d be happy if it were more accepted, or liked, or tolerated, but on the other hand you have the feeling that yes, this is totally normal. That person’s going to work, I’m going to the concert. People from Schaffhausen aren’t interested in hype.”

“It’s certainly that way for Irène too: ‘Playing in the concert hall is great, but I don’t want or need to make a big deal about it.’ That’s a typical Schaffhausen attitude: I do my thing, and I’ve been doing it for a long time, and now other people are taking notice, but I’m not interested in that. It’s a very nice way to be, and I’m very familiar with it in Irène’s case. It’s the strength to say ‘I’m sitting down here, and the king or anyone might be there, but I’m going to play my thing, and if they don’t like it they can go home, I’m going to do it.’ That focus is unique. She sits down, starts playing, stops, done. Leaves the stage and talks to me about her sisters. It’s quite funny.”

Swiss drummer Lucas Niggli (born 1968) is familiar with Schaffhausen: his grandparents lived there, and it’s his mother’s hometown. “Irène was born the same year as my mother, and her birthday is one day after my mother’s. My mother can also be hardheaded, but I don’t think that’s a typical Schaffhausen characteristic. I think it was a big influence on Irène that her parents were innkeepers, and also maybe being close to Germany, that already gives you a kind of flexibility, more than in the interior of Switzerland. If you live at the border, maybe you’re more willing to cross boundaries.”

The Modern Jazz Preachers, 1958–1961: the Legacy of Art Blakey

In August 1958, the Modern Jazz Preachers from Schaffhausen, featuring 17-year-old Irène Schweizer at the piano, took part for the first time in the Winterthur qualifying round for the 8th National Amateur Jazz Festival in Zürich.

“The inclination towards modern sounds is a general phenomenon in jazz that has increased more and more in the last few years. The Schaffhausen combo with the ambitious name ‘The Modern Jazz Preachers’ plays in the classic cool style and shows notable musical ability. The members are (ladies first!): Irène Schweizer (piano), Mano Fenaroli (bass), Herbie Velder (drums), Werner Bührer (alto saxophone), and Rolf Oechslin (tenor saxophone). In Irène Schweizer, a very promising pianist, we have the rare case in which the female element makes an active appearance in an amateur jazz festival.” (SN, August 27, 1958.)

As it turned out, the Modern Jazz Preachers were selected to take part in the 1958 National Amateur Jazz Festival in Zürich.

“After spending the whole evening playing almost nothing but old and well-known jazz standards, Miles Davis’s piece ‘Four’ was like a breath of fresh air for the dutifully attentive listeners. With that piece, the Schaffhausen jazz combo, playing brilliantly, earned the greatest enthusiasm from the near-capacity audience at the Volkshaus, and made their participation in the NAJF a foregone conclusion. These young amateur musicians then proved that the success of ‘Four’ was no accident by following up with the significantly more harmonically difficult number ‘Walkin,’ in which Irène Schweizer attracted the greatest attention with her distinctive piano playing, full of ideas.” (SN, September 3, 1958.)

In 1959, the Modern Jazz Preachers took seventh place in the category “Orchestra in the Modern Style” at the 9th National Amateur Jazz Festival (NAJF). Irène Schweizer came in fourth in the soloist category for “Swing and Modern Style” on piano; the year before she had been awarded a special prize for best woman participant.

The group performed not only at the functions organized by the Schaffhausen Association of Modern Jazz Listeners (Schaffhauser Interessengemeinschaft für modernen Jazz, IGFMJ), but also sometimes at corporate functions. In March 1960, the Georg Fischer company presented an evening of music featuring the band, attended by almost 450 employees of the company, mostly young people.

A Modern Jazz Preachers concert in Singen, Germany, near the Swiss border, presented as “Jazz from Switzerland,” attracted 300 listeners. The Schaffhauser Nachrichten reported:

The trio numbers, played in the style of Errol Garner with soloist Irène Schweizer at the piano, and blues vocals by bandleader and tenor saxophonist Rolf Oechslin, were particularly well-received. This second concert by the Preachers in the Uhland concert hall in Singen was only the second time since the opening of the hall that as many as 600 people attended. Although during their first visit they played both traditionally and in the modern jazz style, this time there were no concessions to the audience, apart from the pieces presented by the Irène Schweizer Trio in the style of Erroll Garner: ‘Lullaby of Birdland’ and ‘Cheek to Cheek.’ The Preachers remained absolutely true to their modern jazz ideal, and for two hours they ‘preached’ cool and passionate hard bop, received with appreciation by the audience, which included critically sophisticated listeners. (SN, June 26, 1960.)

Gustav Sigg (1928–2017), a professional lathe operator, supported Schweizer’s early career as a musician in his free time. He wrote about her in the Schaffhausen newspaper, organized performances in Singen, and was the director of the IGFMJ. He remembers: “Irène had the good fortune to grow up in an inn. Already as a young girl, she was always around, and watched how the drummer and the pianist played. At the sound checks, she watched, and sometimes played a bit. Little by little she grew into it, she got more and more interested in music. Earlier on, even classic jazz pieces were played as dance numbers, with a swing feeling. So she got that feeling very early on. When the musicians set up their instruments in the hall, she would sit down at the drum kit. As the president of the jazz club, I was there on many such occasions, and I organized a lot of Dixieland concerts in the area near the border. Even while Irène was still in school, she found some students her own age to work with, and put together a Dixieland group. That was the classic instrumentation: piano, bass, drums. But they still didn’t have anyone to play piano. So in the mid-1950s, she appeared with a jazz band, the first and only woman in Switzerland to do so. At that time it was practically unthinkable to see a woman playing with a band of men. It was clear that she had a natural feeling for the music, and her technique was also very good. When the Dixieland group had run its course, she got curious about more modern pianists, and suddenly it was like a lightbulb went on for her, and that was it for the boogie-woogie and blues.”

“Because of World War II, for eight years we were cut off from America, the country jazz came from. The first bebop records didn’t arrive in Switzerland until after 1949, and they made people crazy. Some people were totally enthusiastic, and others, especially older people, thought those records had nothing to do with jazz. In the jazz clubs there were wild discussions. There were a lot of meetings where old and new jazz records were played, and the traditionalists always said they didn’t want to hear bebop. So then there were schisms, and new clubs were opened. I went with the modernists. At the concerts we organized, we had the problem that the audience was for the most part not ready to listen to this new music for two hours. The young men came to the concerts because of Irène, but she wasn’t interested in them. Anything having to do with sex was absolutely taboo, and anyone ‘playing for the other team’ was looked down on. We’d wear ties to the youth club we organized, and the shy girls’ parents were there chaperoning to make sure everything was safe, sheltered. It took some time for the audience to train their ears, to be able to hear the new music. The musicians working with Irène weren’t Swiss, they were German. When we put on concerts with her in Schaffhausen, people would say she was playing wrong notes. People were hostile, they wrote letters about it, but Irène just shut everything out when she played. Then we noticed that after the war, the people in Singen became more open-minded. So we started organizing concerts there. And in Germany, young people got interested in this music right away—when Irène was at the piano, people came and sat all around her, on the floor, just to hear her music. It was incredible.”

“Jazz Becomes Feminine” was the title of an article about the Swiss Amateur Jazz Festival in Zürich, which appeared in the September 8, 1960 issue of the journal Sie+Er.

In those years, the NAJF was the high point of a country-wide cellar jazz movement that attracted predominantly young listeners. On September 13, 1960, at the 10th Amateur Jazz Festival, which for the first time also included groups from outside Switzerland, Irène Schweizer was again awarded the special prize for best woman participant. In the category “group pianist,” she was awarded first prize, together with Paul Thommen (from Geneva), and in the category “group playing in the modern style” the Modern Jazz Preachers took second place. As a “gift from Zürich businesses,” the prizewinner “Miss Schweizer” was awarded a pack of cigarettes, a pack of chewing gum, and a men’s shirt.

On March 25, 1961, the Modern Jazz Preachers gave what was provisionally their final concert, in the hall of the Restaurant Falken. In a farewell tribute, the Schaffhausen newspaper celebrated the effect the band had had on the young listening audience:

The spontaneous, communal experience of a jazz concert or dance evening is very exciting for many young people, and often inspires them to seek out records in order to further explore the secrets of this rhythmically and melodically fascinating music. In this regard, the Preachers have done much good, and, in dozens of concerts, have achieved notable success. They have been particularly well received at their concerts in Germany—Singen, Konstanz, Waldshut, Tiengen—and the opinion of a German jazz expert, that the Modern Jazz Preachers are the best amateur Jazz group in the upper Rhine region, from Basel to the Bodensee, is certainly no exaggeration. In any case, no one can deny that the Preachers and their love of making music have brought joy to countless listeners, young and old. The band’s breakup, due to various professional changes in the musicians’ lives, is now a sad reality. Rolf Oechslin is taking on a position as a schoolteacher in the countryside, Mano Fenaroli is working in Zürich, Herbert Velder has completed his basic military training, Irène Schweizer is moving to England, and Wilfried Blättler is studying in Geneva. (SN, April 14, 1961).

England, 1961: First Girlfriend

In 1961 Schweizer traveled to Bournemouth, England, to improve her language skills. “I met my first girlfriend in 1961 at a language school, and had a six-year relationship with her. Her name was Monique Braun and she came from Biel. She spoke French and Swiss German. Her mother was French Swiss and her father was German Swiss. Since I didn’t like speaking French so much, we spoke English from the beginning. And one day she showed up with a copy of Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis, and I almost died. I had never known a woman who listened to or liked anything like this before, and she told me she had jazz records and that she listened to Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan, and I told her I played the piano and I loved jazz.”

“She was the first woman I met who knew something about jazz and had records. All the students lived with families, in rented rooms. Where I lived there was a piano. Monique lived with another family, and on the weekends we met and fell in love. It was very innocent and platonic between us. We didn’t want to go back to Switzerland after the language school, we wanted to go to London, so the school found au pair jobs for us. She fell in love with a bass player who lived in Bournemouth, but we remained friends. I visited her many times in Biel after we were done with school, and she also came to Zürich. She did an apprenticeship there as a nurse at the psychiatric clinic, and that was during the time when I was playing nights at the Africana. Monique got married later and had two children. Now she lives in Geneva. The separation was difficult, but we’ve stayed in touch with each other. I see her once a year; I go to Geneva, or we meet in Bern.”

Authentically Lesbian: Inner Freedom

According to Schweizer, her first girlfriend was “anyway not authentically lesbian, as I am. I already knew at school, at the age of twelve or thirteen, that I wasn’t sexually attracted to men. But it’s also true that my best friends were often men, some of the musicians were also my best friends. Feminism didn’t exist yet, and I didn’t know what it was, I just always thought, yes, there must be other women who are like me. But I was so involved in the music that I put all that to one side, I didn’t want to face it directly. The fact that I never brought a boy home with me was not an issue, no one ever brought it up or asked me about it. My mother just knew that I was friends with Monique.”

London, Ronnie Scott’s: A New Dimension

Looking back, Schweizer has always called her time in London the best time of her life. “Monique worked for a Jewish family and I worked for a very wealthy family in Chelsea Park Gardens, a very expensive neighborhood. It was a family with three children, a nanny, and a cook. And all I had to do was clean a little, dust things, bring them breakfast and do the laundry. In the morning I worked and in the afternoon I could practice at the neighbor’s place. They had a grand piano. The woman I worked for knew that I played piano, and she arranged for me to be able to practice at the neighbor’s. In London I could occasionally practice piano in a music school in the afternoons, they rented the room by the hour for rehearsals, and my employer also arranged that for me.”

Schweizer also took jazz piano lessons in London: “When I was an au pair in London, Eddie Thompson was my teacher. The bass player, who liked to flirt with Monique, sometimes played in a trio with Eddie, a blind pianist who also taught lessons. So I got his address and phone number, and I took the tube to his place every two weeks. It was almost 45 minutes away. He was a classic modern jazz pianist who knew all the standards, and I learned to play all the important standards with him, like ‘But Not For Me’ and ‘The Man I Love’—everything you had to be able to play back then. He was very nice, a good pianist, and he was well-known in London. That was actually the only time when I really had jazz lessons, with Eddie Thompson, and very briefly also with Terry Shannon, who performed regularly at Ronnie Scott’s. Apart from that I taught myself everything by listening to records and rehearsing with other musicians. Learning by doing.”

On her days off Schweizer met Monique, “we went to the cinema in the evening and we experienced ‘Beatlemania,’ that was just starting then. But that didn’t interest either of us at all. We went to Ronnie Scott’s in the evening, to the old Ronnie Scott’s on Gerrard Street, where I got to know all the English musicians. I was there all the time, almost every night; it was practically my living room. I saw Tubby Hayes, Phil Seamen, Joe Harriott, all the English musicians, a different band every night. I was making five pounds a week. That was sixty francs back then. I don’t remember how much it cost to get in, but I was there almost every night.”

She washed glasses behind the bar sometimes, too. When the club found out that she played piano, a bassist took care of her, Schweizer says. “He let me play in another, smaller club on Swallow Street, where piano trios played. When a musician was taking a break, I was allowed to step in and play one or two songs, sometimes on drums. They paid a lot of attention to me and encouraged me. In London, I moved around very freely. I was never afraid, even if I had to walk home late at night from Ronnie Scott’s in the West End. And nothing ever happened to me. Besides the music scene, I was also interested in English and French cinema. It was the time of Free Cinema and the Nouvelle Vague. I went to the movies all the time; I saw Godard’s films, and also the first films of Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta. I was fascinated by these films, because they were so different from ‘ordinary’ cinema. A new world of emotions opened up for me.” (In: Nigg, pp. 56–66).

In Evan Parker’s view, Irène Schweizer studied “the jazz life” in London and finally decided to become a musician: “Irène knew all the generation of English modern jazz players, that were also my heroes. And she was a little bit closer to them in the sense that she was at Ronnie’s every night, whereas I had to save up and go occasionally to those kinds of places. So, we have that connection with her history in London; I know what Irène is talking about. She came from the same place as she did the same listening. Like I said, she was at Ronnie Scott’s. People position themselves in those early years, late teens to early 20s. If you look at what all of those individuals did, you’ll find that they gravitated to be in the right place. Alex von Schlippenbach and Manfred Schoof lived in Paris, sleeping on the floor, playing for nothing, just opening up sets for well-known bands. And Peter Kowald, what was Kowald doing? He was drifting all over Europe looking for people. He came to London, he tracked down John Stevens. The first time I met Peter Brötzmann was when he came to London. And, everybody had that approach. Or, I’m sure when you look at the history of all those individuals, you’ll find that in that crucial period where they were just forming a sense of what might be possible. What from their own abilities, and what response would they get from the scene or the community? I think Irène came here to learn English, but what she really wanted was to play jazz and listen to jazz and see how the jazz musicians behaved, how did they talk to one another, what kind of opinions did they hold? You learn how to integrate yourself into a community. And Irène’s trip to London has to be seen in that context, and then there’s a period where you don’t know what happens next.”

Secretary: Inner Security

“My mother paid for my education, the boarding school, the language school in London, and the business school in Zürich that I attended in between the boarding school in Lucens—Institut protestant des jeunes filles—and England. After that, I worked as a secretary and I lived off that money. I was able to write shorthand in three languages, and I could type and do transcripts. I did nine-to-five jobs for various American companies. In Zürich I played music, rehearsed with musicians, and also earned a little money from music. But my main income was as a secretary. In Zürich, I had a furnished room very close to the Africana in Sumatra Street, five minutes from Niederdorf, where the Africana was.”

Her younger sister Margrit says that Irène later left her job as a secretary and only played the piano. “Those were difficult years in the beginning, having to get by without a job, without any additional income. That was certainly hard, but she made it. We used to think that Lotte was the talented one. But in London, Irène was the one who got her act together.”

“Compared to London, Zürich is a small town,” says Schweizer. “Zürich is so bourgeois and provincial, and London was my first real big city, it was incredibly fascinating. And I loved the language too. London was actually the most beautiful time of my life—but I didn’t want to move there, and in Zürich I made contact with all the good musicians who lived and played here. Then I started playing a lot in Switzerland, with Pierre Favre and all kinds of people. I’ve always lived better here, part-time jobs were pretty easy to find in Zürich. I couldn’t have done that in England.”

International Amateur Jazz Festival in Zürich: Amateur Was an Attitude

The amateur status of jazz musicians is a Swiss peculiarity. “Amateur” refers to those musicians who play their own music, without making compromises. They earn their living in other ways. By contrast, a musician who is considered “professional” typically has a position in a symphony orchestra. Schweizer describes the Swiss amateur jazz festival as “unique in the world—it existed already in the mid-1950s. All the musicians who took part had some other way to make money, which means that they played jazz but didn’t make a living from it. The musical standard among many of these musicians was insanely high. André Berner was the organizer of these amateur jazz festivals in Zürich. He was an important figure. Hans Kennel, Franco Ambrosetti, Bruno Spoerri, they all played the festival. They were all amateurs back then; they had a career or they were students. There were also people who came from very rich backgrounds, like Alex Bally—his uncle was the shoe company Bally—and Ambrosetti, who had a factory in Ticino. Ambrosetti and Kennel were amateur musicians because they didn’t play jazz as a profession, but they played everywhere. I don’t know how they managed to do all that—work, family, jazz. I was also an amateur musician at the time, but of course I wanted to stay a musician. Franco took over his father’s factory, so did Hans Kennel. Bruno Spoerri was a psychologist, he had a family and he knew that he couldn’t make a living from music. But it wasn’t like that for me; I didn’t want a family, I wanted to become a musician and stay one, and to be able to make a living from it. It took me a long time to get to the point where I could just play music. Then there were also the musicians who played commercial music. Hazy Osterwald played a lot of jazz in the beginning, he was a good trumpet player, but then the band got more and more commercial, a show band. He made really good money, but the music got worse and worse; it was really bad. ‘Amateur’ was an attitude, you preferred to work a job to earn money. You made music out of passion, that’s how it was with us. Most of the people who did that had jobs where they made good money and didn’t have to get too involved in the work. But then they could make the music they wanted to play, without prostituting themselves. That’s how it was with most musicians in Switzerland back then.”

Saxophonist Bruno Spoerri is six years older than Schweizer: “That was a big age difference, of course, I was almost a father figure. When I met her, I was already married, and soon I had children, so I was in a completely different place. In some way, I came from the jazz tradition. I came to Zürich in 1962, after having lived in Basel and Biel. Because I had won first prize at the first Amateur Jazz Festival in 1954, I was practically part of the establishment. That was the relatively traditional Metronome Quintet, which later played light jazz and jazzy pop songs. I quit because I wanted to play more modern stuff.”

From the Jazz Cousins to the First Irène Schweizer Trio (1962–1964): The Beginnings

In 1962 the Schaffhausen newspaper wrote: “The new Irène Schweizer Trio with bassist Urs Rohr and drummer Herbert Velder performed with great success in the preliminary round of the Jazz Festival on August 25, 1962, at the City Casino Winterthur.” The new trio, which mainly played soul jazz, emerged from the hard bop quintet The Jazz Cousins, which included Schweizer, Rohr, and Velder, as well as cornetist Jürg Grau and saxophonist Alex Rohr. Her appearance with the Jazz Cousins “earned Irène Schweizer the winner’s pennant, donated by the company Sinalco.” (SN, September 3, 1962). Under the headline “Irène Schweizer: First Lady of Jazz,” the Schaffhausen paper reported on the second International Amateur Jazz Festival in Zürich, where Schweizer was the only female participant. Selections played by the Jazz Cousins included ‘Miguel’s Party,’ ‘Oleo,’ ‘Close Your Eyes,’ and the Horace Silver compositions ‘Sister Sadie,’ ‘Sayonara Blues,’ and ‘Tokyo Blues.’