If jazz has been caricatured down the years as an art form populated by an insular bunch of males scratching their beards to decide on the hippest version of My Funny Valentine, one of the most heartening antidotes to that stereotype was Irène Schweizer, the brilliant Swiss pianist who has died aged 83.
Schweizer was a world-class improviser of inventiveness and reflexive group awareness, a lifetime champion of female participation in jazz, and a co-founder of two adventurous festivals as well as a record label.
She formed her first trio, with the bassist Uli Trepte and the drummer Mani Neumeier, in 1963, a partnership that within five years had evolved through hard-bop and the piano methods of Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner towards free improvisation. With that group’s breakup in 1968, she formed another trio, soon to become a quartet, that included the Swiss percussionist Pierre Favre and the British free-sax virtuoso Evan Parker.
She also played for several years in the 70s with the German saxophone avant-gardist Rüdiger Carl, and in 1977 she joined the Feminist Improvising Group (later renamed the European Women’s Improvising Group), set up by the vocalist Maggie Nicols and the bassoonist/composer Lindsay Cooper. She found membership of that all-female group to be a refreshingly relaxing experience in which “I didn’t have to prove how good I was, or how fast I could play”, adding that “it was more about expression, how you could communicate your feelings”.
During the 80s Schweizer began playing with the French double bassist Joëlle Léandre, first in a duo, and then in Les Trois Dames and the theatrical and funny Les Diaboliques. In 1986 she and the music journalist Patrik Landolt founded Switzerland’s innovative Intakt record label for new music, and that year Schweizer also initiated the Canaille International Women’s Festival of Improvised Music in Zurich (which ran in various locations until 1992), as well as the city’s adventurous and still active Taktlos festival.
In her later career she embarked on a long series of enthralling international duos with drummers, including with Louis Moholo-Moholo, Andrew Cyrille, Favre and Han Bennink. The percussiveness of Schweizer’s playing (often compared with Cecil Taylor’s, though their melodic sources were very different), contributed to making these encounters some of the most exciting work of her career.
Born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, Schweizer was the second of the three daughters of Frieda (nee Bosch) and her husband, Karl Schweizer. The couple ran the town’s popular Landhaus restaurant, part of a community hall also used for union meetings, weddings and parties – for which the premises had three pianos. Irène first learned accordion and drums, but subsequently she and her older sister, Lotte, took refuge from the many absences of their busy parents by practising classical music and jazz by themselves on the piano. That refuge became even more important to them when their father died of a heart attack at 49 in 1951, when Irène was nine.
After three years at a local secondary school, Schweizer’s mother sent her to the Lucens Castle institute for girls in French-speaking Switzerland, then the Raeber school in Zurich. But her musical gifts often found her excused classes to practise the piano, and at 16 she won a Schaffhausen amateur talent contest.
She later recalled to the writer and ethnomusicologist Heinz Nigg that she had begun to feel she was falling in love with a female teacher by the age of 12, and soon with girls at her school. Music became a refuge again, now from feelings that were taboo at the time. Schweizer’s embrace of her sexuality by the age of 20 would guide not only her emotional life, but also her commitment to unorthodox music, and to the leftwing politics that in later life she found had even attracted the attention of agents in Swiss intelligence.
In 1961 she moved to study English in London, where she frequented the original Ronnie Scott’s club in Chinatown, while expanding her technique and harmonic knowledge in lessons with the pianist and teacher Eddie Thompson.
Returning to Switzerland, she worked as a secretary, regularly visited Zurich’s Africana jazz club (where the exiled South African piano star Abdullah Ibrahim, then known as Dollar Brand, frequently played), and established her first trio with Trepte and Neumeier, setting off on a musical career that was characterised by originality and versatility.
“She comes up spontaneously with so many counter-strategies to whatever you’re doing,” said the composer Barry Guy in 1991, by which time Schweizer was a European jazz celebrity. “She has an amazing imagination, and she’s totally different from one night to the next. You see jaws drop within the band, let alone the audience.”
Schweizer’s work with Guy, for his 1991 Theoria album, was one of many collaborations she undertook with other musicians during the 90s, including the Americans Barre Phillips (bass), Marilyn Crispell (piano), Joey Baron and Hamid Drake (both drums); with Les Diaboliques and the Swiss saxophonist and flautist Co Streiff; and reunions with Favre, Bennink and Moholo-Moholo.
Schweizer continued with an energetic programme throughout the first two decades of the 21st century, culminating in unaccompanied concerts at Lucerne’s Culture and Congress Centre (2005) and Zurich’s Tonhalle (2011), mixing originals with classic jazz pieces by Thelonious Monk, Jimmy Giuffre and Carla Bley.
In 2018, at the age of 76, she received Switzerland’s Grand Award for Music and a year later took part in a gig with Drake, released as a live album on Intakt as Celebration, before declining health forced her to retire in 2021, shortly after her 80th birthday. That year a biography of Schweizer, This Uncontainable Feeling of Freedom, by Christian Broecking, was published in Switzerland.
She is survived by her sister, Margrit.
• Irène Schweizer, pianist, born 2 June 1941; died 16 July 2024
