Irene Schweizer: Piano Solo: Prelude To A Kiss And More

It might be a touch of hyperbole to say the world wasn't ready for Swiss pianist Irène Schweizer's 1986 recording Piano Solo: Prelude To A Kiss And More. Yet listening to it some 40 years later, that may well be your first thought. Schweizer (1941—2024) had already established herself as a formidable improviser through recordings such as Wilde Señoritas (FMP, 1977) and Hexensabbat (FMP, 1978), both later remastered and reissued as a double CD by Intakt Records in 2002. She also recorded several solo projects, although most appeared after she had achieved the international recognition she deserved. Had listeners heard this live performance, recorded in Zürich on February 1, 1986, that recognition might have arrived much sooner.

Schweizer's music was remarkably fluent, bridging American jazz, European improvisation and African musical traditions. Her collaborations with South African musicians Abdullah Ibrahim and Louis Moholo-Moholo and European innovators Manfred Schoof and Gunter Sommer helped shape a musical language that was both expansive and deeply rooted. In 1984, she traveled to New York to immerse herself in the music surrounding the pre-and post-New Thing, absorbing the city's history while adding her own perspective. By the time of this Zurich performance, she had returned home as a fully formed artist, one whose music was thoroughly contemporary without severing its connection to jazz tradition.

The performance begins with two extended tour-de-force compositions/improvisations, "IAX—Been to America" and "Struggle on the V.G. Terrace." Schweizer moves effortlessly between dancing chamber music, passages resembling a highly organized Cecil Taylor, and echoes of George Gershwin. Throughout, fragments of Thelonious Monk surface like familiar landmarks. Monk is more than a reference point here; he is a musical interlocutor. Schweizer quotes, reshapes and challenges his language, sometimes with the piano prepared from within, sometimes while whistling along with her playing.

That dialogue becomes explicit in "Serious Fun," where Monk's fingerprints are scattered throughout Schweizer's own vocabulary. She then turns directly toward her source material with a luminous rendition of Monk's "Reflections." On "Once Again Thelonious," she combines "Work" and "Friday the 13th," transforming the compositions into a spirited conversation between her own improvisational language and Monk's unmistakable architecture.

"Dancing on the Bowery" similarly takes inspiration from Ornette Coleman's "Ramblin.'" Schweizer deconstructs Coleman's melody and rhythm, rebuilding it as a propulsive piece of chamber jazz. The music seems to carry the energy of New York without attempting to reproduce it, a memory of the city translated through Schweizer's own hands.

That idea reaches its most playful expression in the title piece, Duke Ellington's "Prelude to a Kiss." Schweizer brings New York to Zürich in an ingenious collision of past and present, performing Ellington's elegant ballad while a boombox plays a radio broadcast filled with announcements from the Big Apple. The effect is simultaneously humorous, poignant and revealing: the pianist is not merely playing American jazz; she is placing herself inside its history, listening across geography and time.

Piano Solo: Prelude to a Kiss and More ultimately sounds less like a document from 1986 than a message that somehow arrived early. Schweizer understood that jazz history was not a museum but a living conversation, one in which Monk, Ellington, Coleman, Taylor and others could be quoted, dismantled and reinvented. With extraordinary technique, humor and curiosity, she made that history her own. Forty years on, this performance doesn't sound like music the world wasn't ready for, it sounds like music that was waiting for the world to catch up.