Irene Schweizer Trio With Dewan Motihar Trio - Jazz Meets India

Swiss pianist Irene Schweizer (1941), who had cut her teeth in a local trio with drummer Mani Neumeier. A few months after British saxophonist Joe Harriott, she pioneered Indo-jazz fusion by recording Jazz Meets India (october 1967), that featured a jazz quintet with trumpeter Manfred Schoof and Neumaier improvising with and a trio of Indian musicians Irene Schweizer was 26 when she performed with the Dewan Motihar Trio. While her contemporaries like The Beatles had formed earlier in England and played Hamburg, Schweizer, a Swiss, probably influenced by Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp, had formed a free jazz trio in Germany with Uli Trepte and Mani Neumeler

Prog rock and avant garde fans will recognise the duo as the founders of Guru Guru. Less than a year later, the duo would form the Krautrock band with Jim Kennedy. Guru Guru had one foot in jazz and the other in rock. They gave to the Irene Schweizer Trio a heaviness only drummer Mani Neumeier could invent.Schweizer was part of the Feminist Improvising Group, whose members include Lindsay Cooper, Maggie Nichols, Georgie Born and Sally Potter. At the time, this was radical stuff. Women in jazz were relishing their role as players and not just being the diva in front of the band. Schweizer has been compared to Cecil Taylor in The Penguin Guide To Jazz.

This concert was part of a series of shows recorded by Germany's SWF (Südwestfunk Baden-Baden) station. The tour was in support of artists from around the world and had the name Jazz Meets The World and included Americans like The Archie Shepp Quartet, Germany's Globe Unity big band, France's Barney Wilen, from India the Dewan Motihar Trio, flamenco jazz with the Pedro Itturalde Sextet with Paco de Lucia and the Indonesian All-stars led by Tony Scott. There was also a segment called Jazz meets Africa with Olatunji and American Philly Joe Jones.
This show offered covers only the Irene Schweizer Trio (Irene Schweizer p; Uli Trepte b; Mani Neumeier d) and is a merge of two excerpts recorded from German radio that contains two versions of the long Manfred Schoof composition, Brigach And Ganges, which features Indian classical music. In turns, the jazz trio weighs in with the melody led by Schweizer's piano then gives way to the sitar and tabla of the Dewan Motihar Trio. (Diwan Motihar on sitar, Keshav Sathe on tabla, Kasan Thakur on tamboura). It is a duel between free jazz and Indian raga. Neumeier's drumming thunders while the Dewan Motihar Trio offer an intriguing Asian variant to heavy drumming

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