Irène Schweizer Trio with Uli Trepte and Mani Neumeier (1964–1967): Suddenly Free
In 1964, at the 14th International Amateur Jazz Festival in Zürich, Schweizer took first place as a soloist and second place for the Trio. Radio and television recordings followed, and in August 1965 the Irène Schweizer Trio played with great success at the jazz club in Prague. At the 1965 International Jazz Festival in Vienna, the Trio was honored as the best visiting group.
Mani Neumeier remembers that the trio was initially rejected: “We were still playing in Schaffhausen in 1963, against a headwind, because the press said it wasn’t music. Prague, on the other hand, was a great experience. It wasn’t easy to get there; you needed certain permits. But once we were there we were totally respected by the audience and treated like gods. People brought us gifts. They were still half into Dixieland and swing and they were totally enthusiastic about what we were doing.”
As Peter Bürli reports, Schweizer made radio recordings as early as the mid-1960s: “She played a bit more freely with her trio, but it was still clearly in the jazz tradition. I noticed that she always had these wave movements. I listened to her recordings in our archive going back in reverse chronological order, and that helped me understand where she stands today. If she’s coming back to her beginnings now, it’s not a reactionary movement, those are her roots. Simple and moving, that’s where she’s at home.”
Africana: Still No Avant-Garde
On the origin of her trio, Schweizer says that she met Uli Trepte and Mani Neumeier in the Africana, at Mühlegasse 17:
“At that time Mani was playing Ramsey Lewis pieces in a trio, and Uli was always hanging out at the Africana. Down in the basement there was a storage room that had been converted into a rehearsal room with a small piano. It wasn’t open to the public. The musicians who were playing upstairs in the café could rehearse downstairs in the afternoon. That’s where we got together. Remo Rau organized the concert program, and suddenly we were the trio. We rehearsed like crazy. Bill Evans and Paul Bley were my role models, and slowly we developed towards free playing, we stopped playing compositions, instead we went more and more to free passages, including playing without a regular pulse and functional harmony. We bought the first LP by Paul Bley, Footloose with Pete LaRoca on drums, and we were totally thrilled. Then came Coltrane with McCoy Tyner, and we copied all the tracks from the first Coltrane quartet records. That was exhausting, we had to rehearse a lot and there was no sheet music, we had to learn everything by ear. The songs, the harmonies, we learned everything from the records. The Africana hasn’t been around for a long time, now it’s the Hotel Scheuble. When jazz didn’t work financially any more, they booked English rock bands and ‘beat’ musicians, and at the end of the 1960s the café closed.”
“When Irène Schweizer first appeared on the Zürich jazz scene, it was a kind of religious war. It took place in the Africana, a somewhat dingy, dark cave between the university and the ETH on the one hand, and Malatesta and the Fantasio-Bar on the other, Switzerland’s most important jazz center at the time and one of the most exciting in Europe.” (Tages-Anzeiger, November 9, 1991).
Bruno Spoerri, after leaving the Metronom Quintet in 1962, was soon playing with Remo Rau, Hans Kennel, and Alex Bally in the Africana house band. “From Irène’s point of view, when she first arrived on the scene we were already established. She also comes from the tradition,” says Spoerri. “I have a recording of her from the jazz festival in 1958 that I rescued from the radio studio. She wasn’t fully developed yet, playing with a group from Schaffhausen and a wooden drummer who couldn’t swing at all. She was by far the best of the group and already had a good, percussive touch. In the Africana she was part of the crowd who, for one thing, were Dollar Brand fanatics, who followed Dollar Brand, and they also revered Remo Rau, who was the father figure there. But the young musicians saw themselves as rebelling against the establishment, meaning us. Later, in the Wuppertal Kaputtspielphase (‘broken playing phase’), I of course was involved on the other side. Although we were actually also kind of free when we played compositions by Gary Burton or Michael Gibbs. In 1965 I became a professional musician; I worked for a film company and wrote music for commercials. So again, I was on the other side from them, back then. From Irène’s point of view, I was the establishment and she was the rebel. That was very important in 1968. I was one of the people earning a lot of money, who could support a family, while she really had to fight for her income.”
“In the Africana, the musicians got one franc for every drink sold. At most you’d go home with 20 francs. The professional musicians were extremely poorly paid, too. Even Dollar Brand, who lived in Zürich then and played at the Africana, had a lot of trouble making a living from music.”
“Remo Rau was my jazz father in Zürich,” says Schweizer. “He always gave me the chord changes when I wanted to play a piece and couldn’t find the chords. I sometimes found Horace Silver to be quite difficult harmonically, and then he’d hear the chord progressions and write down the notes for me. He was very good at it. He wasn’t a brilliant pianist, but he was a good teacher. He taught me a lot. After the rehearsals at the Africana we went to eat at the Eckstein. That was a pub where all the musicians met. We’d talk a lot with each other about who was playing what, where, with whom. On those occasions I’d sometimes ask him if he could please figure out the changes of this or that piece for me. And the Predigerhof was the pub where you could buy some alcohol, because the Africana didn’t sell alcoholic drinks.”
“Remo Rau was a little older than us,” says Bruno Spoerri. “He played Dixieland and was a good clarinetist at first. Then he had to stop because he got tuberculosis, and he switched to the piano. In the beginning, the Africana was a small, badly run café where a few amateur musicians played, until Remo came and took over the musical direction. He convinced the boss, who didn’t care about jazz, and starting playing two evenings a week with his own groups. He was the driving force; he invited other groups, encouraged a lot of people, and he helped everyone who asked. He passed on music and ideas; he was really a core figure in the Africana. Musically, Dollar Brand then became even more important.”
Africana flyer, October 1964
Dollar Brand: Hymnic Fascination
For the Modern Jazz Preachers, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers were still the model. When Schweizer played in Africana with the new Irène Schweizer Trio, it was a step in a new direction. She remembers: “Eighty to a hundred people fit into the Africana. It was a non-alcoholic café. We amateur musicians always played the earlier set, from seven to nine, and then either the solo pianist Champion Jack Dupree or Joe Turner or the trio with Dollar Brand played. That lasted until eleven-thirty or twelve, because closing time was half past midnight. Brand’s trio with bassist Johnny Gertze and drummer Makaya Ntshoko played for almost two years starting in 1962, mainly in the Africana, and that’s where Duke Ellington discovered him and produced the album Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio in Paris in 1963. I was really fascinated by Dollar. I had never heard of Africans playing jazz before, and Dollar was from Cape Town. His role model was Monk. He really played like Monk, including in the trio. He lived in exile in Zürich with Sathima Bea Benjamin, later his wife.”
“The music in the Africana had nothing to do with the avant-garde, even though what Dollar played sounded close to it to me. I talked with him many times, and often with Makaya too. In the Africana I listened to Dollar Brand, and the great thing for me was to follow the interaction in the trio. Dollar set the direction, he played the themes and the others accompanied. Johnny Gertze was a true accompanist on the bass; he hardly ever played a solo, and Makaya also seldom played solos. It was a strong trio; it really touched me. Dollar Brand played so hymnically and also very calmly, it was really a balm for my soul.”
The best South African musicians, including singer Miriam Makeba, Dollar Brand, and trumpeter Hugh Masekela, came to London during