Farewell to a Quiet Rebel

Irène Schweizer, Marta Sanchez

Irène Schweizer’s Indelible Legacy

The day after publishing last week’s newsletter I got word of Irène Schweizer’s passing, on July 16, in Zurich at the age of 83. I knew that the brilliant pianist had been hit hard by the social restrictions imposed during the pandemic. She was a very social person, and to have her extended network suddenly cut-off due was a tough blow. In my work with Jazzfest Berlin we really wanted to present Schweizer, not to merely mark her 80^th birthday, but to celebrate her remarkably durable music and fierce spirit, but by then her health was failing and she rejected all playing opportunities. I didn’t know the pianist at all, but I got to see her perform several times in Chicago and once in Berlin, years after picking up the pair of excellent solo albums she made in 1990 for Intakt. I curse my faulty memory often, and I can’t say for sure if I attended her Chicago debut in 1995, when she played as part of Rüdiger Carl’s COWWS Quintet, which causes me no little embarrassment, but I know I saw her play solo a couple of years later at the inaugural Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz & Improvised Music. And I’ll never forget her performance at the Empty Bottle in February of 2000, documented for posterity by Malachi Ritscher and released the following year as Chicago Piano Solo.

Irène Schweizer (photo: Dawid Laskowski)

I’ve been digging into her discography over the last week, and each listen sparks new excitement and revelations. In the last few years I’ve found a renewed appreciation for improvised music. That’s not to say that I ever stopped liking the practice, which I feel represents the highest form of musical expression, but hearing a small group of musicians—usually ones who know each other’s playing well—generate new narratives spontaneously, drawing freely from different traditions, incorporating fragments from older tunes, or just building something from thin air (or any combination of these approaches), has given me some of the most profound pleasure and awe I’ve ever experienced as a listener. Sure, there are other listening encounters that have moved me deeply, whether it’s a fully composed work or a Brazilian singer making the most subtle elaborations of a song I adore, but lately hearing a musician weave together a life sound in a single performance can’t really be matched for me. In his liner note essay for Chicago Piano Solo my old friend John Corbett—who organized the Empty Bottle series with reedist Ken Vandermark—quotes Duke Ellington:

Improvisation really consists of picking out a device here and connecting it with a device there, changing the rhythm here and pausing there; there has to be some thought preceding each phrase that is played, otherwise it is meaningless.

That’s a very sharp observation even if it doesn’t necessarily convey every possible approach to improvised music, and I think it certainly applies to Schweizer’s music, which freely reanimated old tropes of her own in endlessly varied ways. She clearly loved lots of  different music and made no bones about drawing upon the traditions that meant the most to her, whether the classic tunes of Thelonious Monk, the irresistibly joyful music of South African expats like Abdullah Ibrahim and the Blue Notes, or Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. Below you can hear the opening piece from the Chicago concert, her own tune “so oder so,” which she performed frequently.

Over the weekend I belatedly read This Uncontainable Freedom: Irène Schweizer—European Jazz and the Politics of Improvisation, the biography the late German jazz critic Christian Broecking published in 2021. The English edition was translated by the great Chicago trombonist Jeb Bishop. From the opening pages Broecking makes clear that the pianist was notoriously taciturn, which meant his book relied heavily on other voices. Schweizer spoke through her music, which was deeply human, joyful, and deeply considered. But the book vividly tells her remarkable story. She was a quietly radical trailblazer—a woman playing jazz in a man’s world when she first emerged in the late 1950s, an even rarer species once she gravitated toward free jazz by the mid-1960s. It’s crazy that I’d never really considered that situation, as she was literally the sole female musician playing alongside folks like Carl, Peter Brötzmann, Manfred Schoof, Evan Parker, Pierre Favre, among many others. 

By the mid-1970s she had basically nailed down her sound, and it’s remarkable how many voices in the Broecking book remark on the utter clarity of her sound. While some might criticize her for figuring it out with such crystalline assurance, she never rested on her laurels, and despite establishing a clear identity, she continued to evolve. Her first great working ensemble was a trio with bassist Uli Trepte and drummer Mani Neumeier—who both famously went on to form the psych band Guru Guru—which cut an album in 1967 that went unreleased until FMP issued it in 1978 as Early Tapes. Below you can check out the opener “Dollar’s Mood,” a salute to Ibrahim when he was still known as Dollar Brand. The high velocity post-bop burner reflects the pianist’s ardor for both South African ebullience and soul jazz propulsion, but there’s no missing the itch for freedom and exploration bristling through the performance.

Until the advent of the excellent Zurich label Intakt in 1986—which Schweizer co-founded—most of her work surfaced on FMP, the German label that crucially documented the European free jazz scene and beyond. The label released work from her fruitful collaborations with reedist/accordionist Rüdiger Carl, in duos, a trio with drummer Moholo-Moholo, and, later, Carl’s wonderful COWWS Quintet. Check out “Blues” from the Schweizer/Carl/Moholo-Moholo trio’s killer 1978 album Tuned Boots. FMP also released the pianist’s first two solo albums, Wilde Se​ñ​oritas and  Hexensabbat, which were later reissued by Intakt, as well as bracing duo albums with bassist Joëlle Léandre and fellow pianist Marilyn Crispell.

Schweizer was a lesbian, which seems like it helped keep the ultra-masculine musical company she kept in the early part of her career at bay, but eventually she formed a strong connection with the burgeoning women’s movement in the 1970s, not only as a staunch supporter of liberation movements and other decidedly leftist causes, but as a co-founder of the Feminist Improvisers Group alongside singer Maggie Nicols, bassoonist Lindsay Cooper, and bassist Georgie Born, among others, which turbulently upended the standard free jazz aesthetic with a wide-open sensibility that could be seen as a precursor to the pan-disciplinary ideas of the New Discipline movement decades later. As with just about everything she accomplished, Schweizer did the work, making her statements in music and action, without much verbal commentary. Disturbingly, no commercial FIG recordings exist—here’s hoping that changes, as some actually sit in vaults here and here—but the pianist did go on to work and record with Nicols and post-FIG bassist Léandre in Les Diaboliques, which served up a sharpened yet still absurdist sound derived from those FIG roots. Below you can hear “Hélas!,” from the trio’s 1997 album Splitting Image.

The pianist might be known best for the incredible series of recordings she made with drummers. Rhythm is a key force in all of her music, so it should come as no surprise that she also played drums, although there are few recordings of that practice, but the motion in her playing made percussive partnerships natural. There are fantastic albums with Favre, Moholo-Moholo, Han Bennink, Joey Baron, Andrew Cyrille, Günter “Baby” Sommer, and Hamid Drake, who played on the pianist’s last official recording, Celebration from 2021, recorded live at the storied Konfrontationen Nickelsdorf festival in the summer of 2019. You can hear the remarkable title track below.

Schweizer did a lot more than what I’ve sketched out here—stellar collaborations with John Tchicai and Don Cherry, repeated projects with Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composers Orchestra, and numerous lesser known partnerships with younger Swiss musicians like Co Streiff, Omri Ziegele, and Jürg Wickihalder. She was involved in starting and maintaining countless concert series in Zurich, as well as the taktlos Festival. She was a true titan, and over the years the depth of her accomplishments only come into greater relief: a true legend.

Spanish Pianist Marta Sanchez Opens Up

Since moving to New York in 2011 Spanish pianist Marta Sanchez has thoroughly integrated herself in the city’s bustling scene, a reliable voice as composer and bandleader in the post-bop community. She’s made a series of sturdy, well-crafted quintet albums for Fresh Sound New Talent, loaded with thoughtful original music, but in the last couple of years she seems to have broken through artistically, opening up her playing and bringing a more personal inspiration to her work. In 2022 she released SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum) (Whirlwind), a book of tunes that reflected on the excruciating experiences of losing her mother during the pandemic, which resulted in music of much greater character and personality.

More recently she’s been part of David Murray’s terrific new quartet with bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Russell Carter, which released Francesca earlier this year on Intakt. The same label recently issued a superb trio record called Perpetual Void with bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Savannah Harris, who both push the pianist while deftly cradling her lyric sensibilities. Her compositions are a response to the crushing insomnia she began experience soon after her mother’s passing in December of 2020, which carried on for two-and-a-half years, and while there is a tightly-coiled tension throughout the album that mirrors the anxiety she felt, the performances don’t allow any kind of torpor or uncertainty to interfere. In fact, the recording almost feels like a victory lap, using music to fight through difficult circumstances. Sanchez does an excellent job at conveying an emotional void in the turbulent ballad “The Absence of People You Long For,” which you can hear below, blending a lithe melody with a gently distended, unsettled rhythmic attack.

Sanchez is playing in Berlin this week, performing in a duo with the fiery Cologne alto saxophonist Angelika Niescier at Donau115 on Wednesday, July 24 (the bill is shared with the trio of keyboardist Liz Kosack, reedist Jeremy Viner, and drummer Mauricio Takara). In March Sanchez collaborated with the Swiss saxophonist and singer Maria Grand on the duo album Anohin (Biophilia), which may or may not be more germane to what will happen this week. Despite Grand’s involvement in meditation and their shared love of melody, there are some surprisingly charged moments here and there. On the opening track “See” Grand only sings, shaping tender, wandering lines that Sanchez moves around deftly, injecting sudden waves of tumult before returning to more measured accompaniment. On the title piece, which you can hear below, Grand picks up her alto, and the dialogue that ensues is deeply impressive, with all sorts of spontaneous jabs and feints revealing a heightened interplay and sensitivity, and when Grand starts singing in the second half of the tune, suffused in reverb, the pianist toggles toward a more introspective yet unresolved questioning. Across the album Sanchez displays a fiery, impatient quality that’s usually lacking in her own work. Niescier is far more extroverted, but she has proven how she can modulate her energy depending on context. I’m excited to hear how they blend their ideas.

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

July 23: Fluxus Orgel & Anderes, as part of Holy Fluxus. From the Francesco Conz Collection, Luciano Chessa, organ (Giuseppe Chiari, Philip Corner, Henning Christiansen, Sylvano Bussotti, Chris Newman, Eric Andersen), 7 PM, St. Matthäus-Kirche, Matthäikirchplatz 1, 10785 Berlin

July 24: Charles Lloyd New Quartet (Charles Lloyd, saxophone, Jason Moran, piano, Larry Grenadier, double bass, and Eric Harland, drums), 6:30 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, taking place at AHF Summer Arts Lounge, Mühlenstraße 63, 10243 Berlin

July 24: Céu, 8:30 PM, Gretchen, Obentrautstr. 19-21, 10963 Berlin

July 24: Kaffe Matthews, electronics; Maurice Louca, guitar and electronics; Hic Up (Marina Cyrino, flutes, Tony Elieh, bass, electronics, JD Zazie, turntables, Matthias Koole, guitar, no-input mixer), 8 PM, 90mil, Holzmarktstraße 19-23, 10243 Berlin

July 24: Angelika Niescier, alto saxophone, and Marta Sanchez, piano; Viner/Kosack/Takara (Jeremy Viner, saxophone, Liz Kosack, keyboards, and Maurico Takara, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

July 26: Rainer Quartet (Joakim Rainer, piano, Jeremy Viner, clarinet and tenor saxophone, Phil Donkin, double bass, and Devin Gray, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

July 27: Rắn Cạp Đuôi, Silvia Tarrozzi, violin, and Deborah Walker, cello, 8 PM, Spreepark, Kiehnwerderallee 2, 12437 Berlin

July 27: Imarhan, 8 PM, Roadrunner's Paradise, Saarbrücker Straße 24, 10405 Berlin

July 27: Malfon Berlin Quartet (Don Malfon, saxophone, Axel Dörner, trumpet, Burkhard Beins, percussion, and Emilio Gordoa, vibraphone), 8:30 PM, Terzo Mondo, Grolmanstraße 28, 10623 Berlin

July 29: Cécile McLorin Salvant & Sullivan Fortner, 8: 30 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, taking place at AHF Summer Arts Lounge, Mühlenstraße 63, 10243 Berlin