Irène Schweizer: jazz pianist, activist, icon. A self-taught musician from the Swiss village of Schaffhausen, at the age of 19 she won first prize at the Zurich amateur jazz festival. (The festival had not anticipated that a woman might win: first prize was a men&apos;s shirt.) The creative journey of this young woman from the north of Switzerland led her inexorably to experimental music: from the London jazz club Ronnie Scott&apos;s and the Zurich club Africana to avant-garde stages in Wuppertal, Berlin, Willisau, Chicago, and New York; from concerts with Don Cherry, Louis Moholo and George Lewis to solo appearances as a celebrated artist in the
Swiss temples of high culture: the Lucerne Culture and Congress Centre and the Zurich Tonhalle. She fought constantly for artistic freedom and autonomy. Her committed action against apartheid and for women&apos;s rights resulted in her surveillance by Swiss intelligence agencies, revealed in the «secret files scan- dal» of 1989. Undaunted, Schweizer persisted in her activism for left politics in Switzerland.
Christian Broecking has researched and written the biography of one of the most exceptional musicians of the post-war period in Europe.

This Uncontainable Feeling of Freedom