The Book Cooks
Excerpt from
This Uncontainable Feeling of Freedom: Irène Schweizer – European Jazz and the Politics of Improvisation
Christian Broecking
Translated from the original German by Jeb Bishop
(Freundinnen und Freunde von Irène Schweizer, Zürich; Broecking Verlag, Berlin; and Hochschule Luzern, Luzern; 2021)
Irène Schweizer, © 2021 Francesca Pfeffer
Zürich, February 2013. A clear, cold winter’s day. Behind the city, the Alps are visible. From the main station, she’s told me, I should take tram line 3, direction Albisrieden, five stations. I’m on time, and at the Kalkbreite station she’s waiting for me: Irène Schweizer, pianist, avant-gardist, icon of Swiss and European free jazz and of the Anti-Apartheid and Women’s Movements. From here, it’s only a few minutes’ walk to her home on the Feldstrasse, in the Aussersihl district. She’s a little nervous, because her heating system picked today to break down. Despite this, we sit in her kitchen, drink tea, and begin to talk about her life. This is visibly difficult for her; she has never been a voluble artist. In preparation for our first meeting, she looked up some articles about herself – documents that she considers important and that were used as the basis for a documentary film about her, made by Gitta Gsell. But she hasn’t collected anything more than this, she says. There’s one longer article that she thinks is particularly good, in which she recounts her life in fifteen pages. More than that isn’t really necessary, she says. She opens up to questions reluctantly. Other people, she says, can certainly tell you more about her. Her companions, musicians, artists, friends, and neighbors. Her family. A few days later, she sends a list of names: companions in her life, or at least part of it. After this, we meet regularly in her apartment. Always in her kitchen, with the balcony overlooking the inner courtyard, where she sat in the past with Günter Baby Sommer and so many other musical colleagues and friends. Not in her studio, where her piano (a Grotrian-Steinweg) and computer reside. Not in her living room, between the paintings – one by Sonja Sekula, which Schweizer bought, and one by Gottfried Honegger, who invited her to choose one from his studio – and among her books, her movies, and an impressive collection of jazz records from the late 1950s to now. Amidst these markers of her life, her apartment is very well-organized and tidy; everything is in its place, as if she needed this orderly framework so that, within it, she could have a place to break the order, to split it open. To deploy this physical force, playing with her forearms and the edges of her hands, with cymbals and beaters, the work on the keys, the strings, the piano’s entire body. Jagged fragments woven into melodies as fine as spiderwebs.
A year and a half later: November 2014. A welcoming fall day. The Zürich “unerhört!” festival, which she co-founded, is in full swing. When I ring her bell at the appointed time, she’s surprised to see me – she thought I was coming the next day. Despite this, she invites me into her kitchen. In the months preceding and following this, there were many meetings and conversations: with her producer, Patrik Landolt of Intakt Records; with her musical companions of many years, Louis Moholo, Pierre Favre, and Han Bennink; with Maggie Nicols and Joelle Léandre; with Jost Gebers, longtime head of Free Music Production (FMP); with Peter Brötzmann and Alexander von Schlippenbach, comrades from the FMP era; with English saxophonist Evan Parker; with Niklaus Troxler, director of the Willisau jazz festival; with her American colleagues Andrew Cyrille and George Lewis; with Swiss saxophonist Co Streiff; with Rosmarie A. Meier, sociologist and founder of the Canaille festival in Switzerland; and with many more. These interviews, nearly 100 of them, are the basis of the present book, together with countless articles and liner notes from newspaper archives, the archive of the Darmstadt Jazz Institute, and Intakt Records, the record label that has promoted, distributed, and documented her work since 1984.
On this day in November 2014 she has a surprise for me: five file boxes full of articles she’s collected over four decades, from 1968 to 2008. Later that evening, when I tell Patrik Landolt about it, he tells me he’s heard about these boxes, but has never seen them. The fact that she has not only shown them to me, but has given them to me in a huge trunk to take to Berlin, is a real show of trust. With her life literally in my briefcase, I set out on my journey.
****
EXCURSUS Les Diaboliques
On February 17th, 1991, the first Swiss concert of Les Diaboliques took place at the Rote Fabrik. In March 1993, the group recorded their first CD, Les Diaboliques, at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris.
On the origin of the name Les Diaboliques, Maggie Nicols remembers: “Once that trio happened, it just went click with Joëlle, Irène, and myself. We got the name from a French journalist who had a radio show. He once said, ‘Oh, what are you doing now? What’s happening?’ I said, ‘I’m coming to Paris again with Irène Schweizer and Joëlle Léandre.’ He went, ‘Ah, Les Diaboliques!’ That had to be the name. That became our name. I think it was lovely, because obviously, the first thing is the music. But also, as well as the music, there’s theater and there’s humor, one of the things that Irène does so brilliantly. Sometimes Joëlle and I, we would clown, we’d be hysterical, and Irène is like the straight woman but very funny. She would just deadpan, and she would play something so funny while Joëlle and I go completely mad. She’s fantastic. She has comic timing; she is a comic genius. We are three very strong women. And because each woman is so strong, it’s totally safe, you know. We can never overshadow each other. You never feel that, because each of us has her own power, and yet together, we really make a synergy, which is quite special.”
George Lewis filmed one of the first concerts by Les Diaboliques, and today uses it as a teaching video for his students at Columbia University in New York. “My favorite band of Irène and Maggie and Joëlle is Les Diaboliques. That’s what I remember from the Les Diaboliques performance in Zürich. I videoed the entire thing, and I show this video all the time in classes because it’s just extremely dynamic. It’s three people who are totally in tune with each other. They are doing completely different things, but they’re doing them in this incredible synergy – you can’t fake that. It’s something that when they came together, you saw the same kind of response. It was the kind of thing that we think of when people say, ‘Well, we’re interested in feminist music,’ or whatever it is. I don’t know what that really is. But if there is such a thing, I would say that this was it, because what you were seeing was people – women – being totally at home with themselves on stage, being open about their personalities, their sexualities, their sounds, communicating in this extraordinary way. The FIG, there’s a whole heritage surrounding that. But Irène is kind of at the head of that table. She’s the person who, I think, at least in Europe and probably here too, put that on the map and encouraged everyone to be able to do that. Because she fought through a lot of the sexism and all that she experienced in the free improvising scene in Europe, and I’m sure in the US, too. This sort of androcentric thing that they have in jazz and all that. She fought through all that. So that coming out on the other side of it, she becomes an inspiration for everybody.”
On the interactions and infrastructure of the trio, Joëlle Léandre says: “This trio is mad. It’s complete freedom. Everything can happen with Maggie. My God, she can talk and dance and then even play. Come on up and there’s a piano bar. And we talk and meet and suddenly everything can happen because we three are so different in terms of music or training or feeling. And why not having a woman audience? Why not, by the way? We are so few on stage. Irène and me take care of business. Everyone gets the same money. No hierarchy. No leaders. When we play this kind of free music, there is no hierarchy. We’re the same exactly. No leadership. When I played with Anthony Braxton, probably Anthony received more than me. I didn’t ask. Of course, I get more money when I’m the leader, I compose, I have a four or five days’ rehearsal. This is normal. But when we play with Les Diaboliques, we are exactly on the same level. Sometimes, Maggie has a story. I don’t know, she can talk about the Queen and talk about, well, dogs or a poor guy on the corner. She invents a story and suddenly, it becomes a narrative. When you improvise, you need this freedom and you have to accept to be open, to know even if it’s not good. If you start to say this is good and this is not good, you make a judgment. When we play this music, we don’t have any judgment. We are just in love and we talk.”
****
EXCURSUS African-American Musicians: Exposed to a Larger Landscape
Irène Schweizer: “I always felt an affinity with Black musicians – Don Cherry, David Murray, Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake – I always had that musical thread, starting with Dollar Brand in the 1960s. But I don’t know where this affinity comes from. I was strongly influenced by the Blue Notes, and I was labeled a ‘free jazz’ pianist even if I wasn’t part of the Wuppertal school. And when, in the 1970s, I played radical free music, I didn’t have a problem with also playing a standard sometimes. I was criticized for that – some people even thought I was a traitor for not following the rules of free music – but I wanted to play what I liked, and my own pieces have melodies and harmonies. Ed Blackwell was my favorite drummer, my great model. Don Cherry was one of my favorite trumpeters, especially in the quartet with Ornette I fell in love with his music. It was really in connection with the Black Panther movement that I discovered how deeply and specifically Black jazz spoke to me.”
Hamid Drake sees significant differences in the attitude towards improvising: “For me, it’s always good to play from time to time with older musicians who have been involved in the creative music, let’s say for a longer length of time, and especially sometimes with European musicians because we have a different – as an American musician, I have a very different sort of – cultural background. I grew up playing R&B and funk and all that, and I came into the jazz world a little later. But when I came into the jazz world, for me, it wasn’t such a big move, because I’d already been hearing the music. And the way Americans approach improvised music, oftentimes it’s still pretty much within what might be called the tradition of jazz.”
“Many Europeans approach it from a totally different perspective, and so, as Peter Brötzmann and Evan Parker say, they felt that maybe they had to break things down first, and then kind of rebuild from the ground level up. I think they wanted to create something different that was their own, and I respect that. So for me, as an American coming into the situation with them – and thanks to Peter Brötzmann, who really introduced me to a lot of the European improvisers – it was very different, very different. I had to really kind of rethink things and find different approaches. So Irène, she’s one of the people that I have to compliment and thank for being sort of like a doorway for me to find some other things, but also remain true to myself, too.”
George Lewis adds: “Passports – remember? You went to one country; it was a totally different scene. So that the creation of a pan-European sensibility – so that now you can speak, not of a national, but a regional or a supranational mode of thinking about improvised music, where you could have people from all those countries performing together and making sense of it – was something that Irène and people like her were spearheading, right? I think that European improvised music includes cosmopolitanism, and it’s something that you find later, I think, in American improvised music, and we owe a lot of it to travel. Now, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), first generation – Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell and all that – there’s a similar cosmopolitanism, and that’s because they went to Europe and became involved. They didn’t do it in quite the same way, but there is this sense of being exposed to a larger landscape. There are many ways the US can still be a little insular. You can still have some guy in a blog believing that he has the right to tell somebody in Copenhagen that he’s not playing the real jazz. That’s ridiculous. You can’t do that. You have to be in your own bubble to believe that. I think because of the East-West situation, because of the openness of countries like France in terms of immigration, and in terms of the movement across borders that was happening, a lot of European musicians didn’t grow up thinking that way.”
“Crossing from France to Germany isn’t the same as going from Illinois to Indiana. That’s why I would say that a European style or whatever – because these people were so influenced by the African Americans – you could even call Irène Schweizer an Afro-Diasporic musician. You could call Evan Parker an Afro-Diasporic musician. I hate to go back to my old terms, ‘Afrological’ and ‘Eurological,’ but if we want to come down on the side of whether someone is more Afrological or Eurological, Irène is definitely more Afrological than John Cage. It’s just how it is. For that matter, so is Joëlle. They all have that mode of complicating notions of origins and lineage and diaspora. I think that’s something that marks European improvised music even today. Maybe that’s what I would say about that first generation in particular: they managed to do what the African-Americans were doing, which was to use their own heritage and situations to express themselves and find their own way. That’s why you can talk about such a thing as European improvised music, it’s because of what Irène and people like her did. When I play with them or listen to them play or whatever, it’s not like because I’m Black, so I do African-American or Afrological music, and because they’re not Black or they’re Europeans, they do European music or Eurological music. That’s getting race, ethnicity, history, and geography all mixed up. There’s much more of a fluidity around those definitions and identities that we don’t really see, so if you’re talking about post-Black, maybe it’s time for a post-European. You never know. It could be a good moment for that.”
© 2021 Christian Broecking
