IRÈNE SCHWEIZER QUARTET: IRÈNE’S HOT FOUR (Intakt Records) (2025)

Irène’s Hot Four are: Irène Schweizer: Piano; Rüdiger Carl: Saxophones, Clarinet, Accordion; Johnny Dyani: Bass, Vocal; Han Bennink: Drums, Percussion, Megaphone. To quote selectively from the press release:

“Irène’s Hot Four is a resounding posthumous release from the great jazz pianist, activist and icon Irène Schweizer, who died last year. The quartet was in existence for around one and a half years and only played a handful of gigs. The concert with the Irène Schweizer Quartet took place in Zurich in 1981 and demonstrates a theatrical performance that remains musically coherent despite the spectacle. The music is action-oriented, pushy, and takes on an urgency and bidding character through constantly interwoven repetitions. This is Jazz with the anger of a Charles Mingus, the boldness of a Fats Waller and the energy of punk”, writes Bert Noglik in the liner notes.”

There are four pieces and I will comment on the first, and longest of these. Entitled ‘Reise’ it begins with some frolicsome piano extemporisation, hoots and honks from the sax, frenetic drumming and percussion developing into a kind of primal scream recalling the ‘anger’ referred to in the liner notes (of John Coltrane’s more avant-garde works or perhaps Albert Ayler or Evan Parker). The frenzy dies down after the 10-minute mark then, after a lull, an unexpected ‘march’ appears based on a two-note bass motif. Of course, ‘controlled chaos’, if I may call it that, is never far away and there is an intense period of virtuosic paying with asphyxiating sounds coming from Rüdiger Carl’s sax (He also plays some beautifully melodic lines!), until purity emerges from the anguish with the intervention of piano and bass to induce a period of calm. But with only five of the 23+ minutes left it is inevitable that there will be a final unexpected twist as hand percussion introduces an engaging theme that almost swings.

This only gives an outline of what to expect (the unexpected!) but if you are at all into avant-garde jazz this is an important recording. As for the lead players, Rüdiger Carl’s trio recording “King Alcohol” has been described as a landmark free jazz album and is stocked by that fine online and on street record shop Honest John’s. Irène Schweizer has worked with Evan Parker and John Tchicai and was part of the Feminist Improvisation Group that included Lindsay Cooper, bassoonist and oboist famous known by prog lovers for her work with Egg, Hatfield and the North, Henry Cow and others.