At the end of the 1960s, Irène Schweizer opened up her playing. Initially, the free jazz movement of African-American influence was the model. “When I followed Cecil Taylor and then heard him live in Stuttgart in 1966, I was completely exhausted. I seriously considered giving up playing the piano,” is a frequently quoted statement by the pianist. After this experience, Irène Schweizer embarked on a search for her own music. 

“In the quartet with Pierre Favre, Peter Kowald and Evan Parker, we realigned ourselves,” says Irène Schweizer in an interview. “In the same year, 1966, in which I heard Cecil Taylor live, I had my first important encounter with my German colleagues. We played at the Newcomer Jazz Festival in Frankfurt and got to know Peter Brötzmann, Peter Kowald, Manfred Schoof, Albert Mangelsdorff and Günter Hampel. We made contacts and made plans for new projects.” Irène Schweizer continues to develop the music of her great role models Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk and Dollar Brand under European auspices. The pianist now plays more often in Berlin than in Switzerland and is part of the hard core of Berlin's “Free Music Production”, the cooperative of the German pioneers of free jazz.

The 70s are the Berlin years of Irène Schweizer. She can be heard regularly at the Berlin “Total Music Meeting”, records her first solo records “Hexensabbat” and “Wilde Senoritas” on the Berlin record label FMP and releases recordings with the multi-instrumentalist Rüdiger Carl and the drummer Louis Moholo. Irène Schweizer can be heard on one of Europe's pioneering free jazz records, entitled “European Echos”, the concept of which was to develop her own music in response to the jazz models of the USA.
In the 70s and early 80s, Irène Schweizer often played at the jazz festival in Willisau: solo or with musicians such as Don Cherry, John Tchicai and Louis Moholo.

In the mid-1970s, Irène Schweizer met the British musician Lindsay Cooper, who played in the progressive English rock music scene around Henry Cow. This acquaintance gave rise to the groundbreaking women's band Feminist Improvising Group with Lindsay Cooper, Maggie Nicols, Georgie Born, Irène Schweizer and Sally Potter. 


Collaborations with female musicians now became an important part of Irène Schweizer's artistic work. More than almost any other female musician, Irène Schweizer shaped the women's music movement. In 1983, she founded the European Women's Improvising Group. Since the nineties, she has played regularly with the women's trio Les Diaboliques with British singer Maggie Nicols and French bassist Joëlle Léandre or in a duo with Zurich saxophonist Co Streiff.
In 1986, Irène Schweizer was involved in the organization of the first women's jazz festival in Switzerland, the Canaille Festival at the Rote Fabrik in Zurich. The three albums by Les Diabliques are an important part of Irène Schweizer's musical biography.

Irène Schweizer is a co-founder of both the Taktlos Festival and the jazz label Intakt Records, which has been releasing the pianist's music since the 1980s. Throughout her career, Irène Schweizer has also been active as a member of organizer groups and musicians' organizations. She is a founding member of the Werkstatt für Improvisierte Musik Zürich (WIM), was involved in Fabrikjazz at the Rote Fabrik for fifteen years and was active in the musicians' organization OHR and the unerhört! festival.
One of Irène Schweizer's most successful bands emerged from the concerts and encounters at the first Taktlos Festival in 1984: the quintet with the American trombonist George Lewis, the singer Maggie Nicols, the bassist Joëlle Léandre and the German drummer Günter Sommer. The band's performances become highlights at international festivals such as the German Jazz Festival Moers. The Frankfurter Rundschau reported: “New Jazz Festival Moers, 1986: The highlight of the festival was the performance of the group Taktlos with Irène Schweizer, Maggie Nicols, George Lewis, Joëlle Léandre and Günter Sommer. Even for an audience accustomed to broad improvisational schemes, the one-hour performance was uncharted territory, but the five musicians succeeded in creating an atmosphere of maximum concentration in the large hall, which could hold almost three thousand people.” The quintet's record entitled “Storming of the Winter Palace” (recorded at the Moers Jazz Festival and Taktlos Zurich) is awarded the German Record Critics' Award for the year.
For the pianist's 50th birthday, the British composer, bassist and orchestra leader Barry Guy writes a composition for piano and orchestra for the pianist, which is premiered in 1991 at the Rote Fabrik by the London Jazz Composers Orchestra and Irène Schweizer under the direction of Barry Guy.


Irène Schweizer's artistic work is characterized by the search for her own musical expression and the courage to take the liberty of disregarding established musical norms and not allowing herself to be measured against conventional standards (musical, ideological, gender-specific). 
Even in the heyday of free jazz, Irène Schweizer allows herself to listen to a theme by Thelonious Monk between her solo expeditions into the heart of the music or to put aside the fast and powerful playing and play very impressionistically. She surprises audiences at her concerts with her idiosyncratic interpretations of jazz classics and fascinates with her emphatically rhythmic playing.
Irène Schweizer calls one of her solo recordings “Many and One Direction” after a painting by Swiss artist Sonja Sekula. Lislot Frei, music editor at Radio DRS2, writes: “Many And One Direction: Irène Schweizer goes in many directions and yet never loses her bearings. With a clear head, she finds her way through the tangle of influences, traditions and styles. Whatever she plays, her signature is unmistakable. It is the concentrated musical experience of forty years. Clear, unadorned, playful, straightforward, humorous music. No one else plays like this." 
On October 8, 2005, Irène Schweizer will perform at the Culture and Congress Center Lucerne, one of the world's best concert halls for classical music. Invited by KKL director Elisabeth Dalucas, Irène Schweizer brings her culture and her people with her and for a few hours raises the temperature of this perfectly cool room considerably. The CD “First Choice - Piano Solo KKL Luzern” captures this memorable concert at the highest level: the extraordinary sound in the hall designed by architect Jean Nouvel, the outstanding sound engineer Martin Pearson and the unique concert atmosphere in front of an audience of over 1500 people. Improvisations mingle with compositions by Irène Schweizer and homages to Don Cherry and Thelonious Monk. Before the solo concert, the film portrait “Irène Schweizer” by Gitta Gsell was shown. The film was later be seen on Swiss TV and is available on DVD.

Four further solo albums are extraordinary documents of Irène Schweizer's great solo art.
In 2000, the pianist played solo at the Empty Bottle jazz club in Chicago, USA. The concert has been published under the title Chicago Piano Solo. At the 2008 Jazz Festival in Schaffhausen, the Schaffhausen-born pianist opened the festival with a solo. She then plays again with the London Composers Orchestra. Both concerts are available on CD.
In 2011, on Zurich's Sechseläuten Monday in April, the pianist played a piano solo in Zurich's Tonhalle. “A great moment”, wrote Manfred Papst, jazz connoisseur and head of the features section of the NZZ am Sonntag. Irène Schweizer played a program that included her own compositions and improvisations as well as pieces by Thelonious Monk, Jimmy Giuffre, Carla Bley - and Dollar Brand. Everything we love so much about Irène Schweizer was there that evening: the freshness, the curiosity, the open mind, to which nothing is alien, from ragtime to the Second Viennese School, from melomaniac South African hymns to the eruptions of Cecil Taylor. This artist is as impulsive as she is sober, as determined as she is modest. The performance ended as it had begun: with a standing ovation.”

Over the years, the pianist, who lives in Zurich, has toured with musicians from Switzerland. Her favorite duo partners include the saxophonist Co Streiff, who now lives in the canton of Aargau, and the two Zurich saxophonists Jürg Wickihalder and Omri Ziegele. All of the duo constellations have released CDs. These are projects in which the focus is not on free improvisations, but on pieces by Co Streiff, Jürg Wickihalder, Omri Ziegele or jazz standards by Duke Ellington, Carla Bley, Thelonious Monk or Don Cherry.

Irène Schweizer took a good ten years to document a core piece of her musical work on CD. From 1986 to 1996, the pianist recorded five piano-drums duo albums with five masters of modern jazz drumming: the South African Louis Moholo, the German Günter Sommer, the American Andrew Cyrille, the Dutchman Han Bennink and the Swiss Pierre Favre. The duo with percussionists is one of Irène Schweizer's favorite forms. The piano-drums duos are legendary, some have made history, such as the duo with the South African drummer Louis Moholo, which became a powerful manifestation against the South African apartheid regime with the title track “Free Mandela” - played in the banking city of Zurich. Irène Schweizer has been playing with Swiss drummer Pierre Favre since the 1970s. In spring 2013, Schweizer-Favre played three concert evenings at the Rote Fabrik cultural center in Zurich - three home concerts in front of an enthusiastic audience. Schweizer-Favre's ultimate live album entitled “Live in Zurich”. It is only the duo's third album in over fifty years of collaboration. In 2015, Irène Schweizer recorded a second album with the Dutch drummer Han Bennink, and at the 2015 Unerhört Festival in Zurich, the pianist met the American drummer Joey Baron: Irène Schweizer's joy of playing, energy, drive, dreamlike interaction and enchanting themes. “This recording documents a fabulous evening in Zurich”, writes American journalist John Corbett in the liner notes. In 2021, the live recording of Irène Schweizer and Hamid Drake's concert at the Konfrontationen Nickelsdorf 2019 festival will be released under the title Celebration.

Despite all her excursions into free music, Irène Schweizer is a jazz musician, and she is committed to American and South African “black” jazz in her musical work. Some of her strong recordings are with American jazz musicians such as Andrew Cyrille, Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake or with Trio 3 with Oliver Lake, Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille. 
In 2017, the “Musical Monsters” recordings from the 1980 Willsau Jazz Festival, which were thought to be lost, were edited and released on CD. John Tchicai, Don Cherry, Irène Schweizer, Léon Francioli and Pierre Favre came together for a festival concert: a few theme tunes, mostly written by John Tchicai, served as a link between the solos and the improvisations. The Musical Monsters played intense music that alternated freely between powerful swinging collective improvisations, lyrical, balladic passages, violent eruptive conglomerations, elegant, cleverly broken lines and folk-inspired playfulness of the kind Don Cherry loved. Zurich jazz critic Christian Rentsch writes in the liner notes: “The music on these tapes sounds so outrageously fresh and lively, so undusted and timelessly contemporary as only a few recordings from that long-gone era of European free jazz. This is music that embarks on an adventure, that takes the freedom to playfully break down stylistic boundaries without getting out of hand.”


The list of concerts performed by Irène Schweizer is endless. The pianist is a frequent guest in Berlin, where her musical career began. Schweizer has played in all the major jazz music concert halls, and although her concerts in the USA are still considered insider tips, they attract a great deal of interest, such as at Chicago jazz club The Empty Bottle or at the two-week Intakt Festival at John Zorn's jazz club The Stone. In Switzerland, the Willisau Jazz Festival, the Schaffhausen Jazz Festival and the Unerhört Festival have accompanied Irène Schweizer's musical career.

The Berlin author, sociologist and music critic Christian Broecking spent three years working on a research project about Irène Schweizer on behalf of the Lucerne School of Music. The 480-page biographical work is now available just in time for Irène Schweizer's 75th birthday. The book “Irène Schweizer. This irrepressible feeling of freedom” (Broecking Verlag, Berlin 2016) meticulously traces Schweizer's life and places it in the context of ‘jazz, avant-garde, politics’. In 2021, the English translation “This Uncontainable Feeling of Freedom. Irène Schweizer - European Jazz and the Politics of Improvisation.” Author: Christian Broecking. Translation: Jeb Bishop. Published by Friends of Irène Schweizer, Broecking Verlag, HSLU. 

In Switzerland, Irène Schweizer has been honored with several cultural awards. In 1990 she received the Georg Fischer Prize of Schaffhausen, in 1991 the Art Prize of the City of Zurich and in 2001 a prize from the Steo Foundation. On her 70th birthday, she received an award from the Canton of Schaffhausen. Several of her records have been awarded the German Record Critics' Prize. The record “The Storming of the Winter Palace” was honored with the annual award of the German Record Critics in 1987. In 2013, the German Record Critics' Jury honored Irène Schweizer, “whose ‘creative restlessness’ has made her one of the most exciting figures in European jazz for half a century”, with the “Nachtigall” award. In 2018, the pianist will be honored with the Culture Prize of the Canton of Zurich and on 13 September 2018 she will be presented with the Swiss Grand Prix Music 2018 in the amount of CHF 100,000.

Irène Schweizer was involved in the organization of the Taktlos Festival in 1984. The radio recordings of the first Taktlos, on which the pianist played in several formations, resulted in the first record by Intakt Records: “Irène Schweizer Live at Taktlos” (Intakt CD 001/1986). When the label was later organized as a non-commercial association for the documentation of contemporary jazz music, Irène Schweizer was on the board of the Intakt Records association and also served as its president for several years before Rosmarie A. Meier took over the presidency of the association.The pianist was on the board of Intakt Records for more than 25 years.After her 75th birthday, the Intakt Records association awarded the pianist the rank of honorary member.

In the summer of 2021, Irène Schweizer decides to retire from performing due to her advanced age and deteriorating health. She refrains from traveling and performing on major stages.On July 16, 2024, Irène Schweizer dies at the age of 82 in a Zurich nursing home.

Read more about Irène Schweizer on our partner's Site: Friends of Irene Schweizer