Irène Schweizer

Pianist Irène Schweizer engaged with prominent European figures in free improvisation and jazz from the 1960s onward and later extended her work to all-female ensembles in the late 1970s. She helped launch the Taktlos and Canaille festivals and served as a founding member of the Intakt label. Born in 1941 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, she absorbed the sounds of dance bands at her father’s restaurant during childhood. Around age twelve she began piano studies, adding drums roughly two years afterward. By seventeen her focus had shifted from earlier jazz idioms to modern styles, prompting her participation in a 1960 amateur event in Zurich. Between 1961 and 1962 she resided in England as an au pair while studying piano chiefly under Eddie Thompson, who introduced her to stride, bebop, and additional approaches. Upon returning to Switzerland she performed soul-jazz and hard bop and formed a trio alongside drummer Mani Neumeier and bassist Uli Trepte. Encounters with South African musicians at Zurich’s African Jazz Cafe—among them Johnny Dyani and Dollar Brand—left a mark at roughly the same period she first experienced Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz. Recordings by Cecil Taylor exerted a further powerful influence. The trio soon attracted attention beyond Switzerland and received an invitation to the 1966 Frankfurt Jazz Festival, where she encountered German improvisers including saxophonist Peter Brotzmann and bassist Peter Kowald. That same year she witnessed Cecil Taylor in live performance and briefly contemplated abandoning the piano, yet ultimately pursued the refinement of her own technique and voice. In the late 1960s she worked in a trio completed by Kowald and Pierre Favre that later welcomed Evan Parker. Several years after that ensemble dissolved she initiated an ongoing partnership with Rüdiger Carl in 1973 that continued intermittently across subsequent decades. Solo appearances commenced in 1976 at the Willisau Jazz Festival. She also joined the Feminist Improvising Group alongside Maggie Nichols, Lindsay Cooper, and additional members; the collective adopted the name European Women’s Improvising Group in 1983 to soften its political associations. From within this circle emerged the intermittent trio Les Diaboliques, formed in the early 1990s with Nichols and Joëlle Léandre. Across her career Schweizer collaborated on recordings with an international roster that included pianist Marilyn Crispell and percussionists Han Bennink, Andrew Cyrille, and Günter Sommer. Irène Schweizer died on July 16, 2024, at the age of 83.