Prelude: Hype/Antihype

Switzerland is a jazz paradise! Forgive my blatant words, but as I’m writing these lines on August 1, the Swiss national holiday, I expect a bit of patriotic exuberance is in order. Moreover, the tone of jazz reports has become rougher, too. If you want to be heard, you’d be well advised to write your messages with a sharp pen and roar as loud as possible. «Pimping» half-baked theses into dogmatic principles and conjuring up a culture clash between the US and Europe, music critics like Stanley Crouch or Stuart Nicholson have poisoned the climate and stand in the way of a more sophisticated view of things. Alas, their terrible simplifications go down well and encourage copycats. This is why we cheerfully push the repeat button: Switzerland is a jazz paradise!

Of course Switzerland is far from being a jazz paradise. Just as New York is no longer the epicentre of the jazz world ... and Oslo is not the new capital of jazz ... and Italy does not have the best jazz scene in Europe ... and neither E.S.T. nor The Bad Plus have revolutionised piano trio jazz ... Apodictic exaggeration keeps the hype machinery running and in doing so distracts people from the sheer wild complexity of artistic creation (as unfortunately do polls, which are widespread in jazz). People want the best and end up consuming what somehow or other appeals to the majority – instead of letting themselves be guided by their own curiosity, they are satisfied with the lowest common denominator (e.g. Robbie Williams or Fischli & Weiss or Esbjörn Svensson). What does the Swiss writer Urs Widmer think about it? «In literature, unlike professional sports, it’s not about being the best, it’s about having as many writers as possible who are good in every possible way. It’s exactly what we find in Switzerland today. Many authors are good in their own way.» This statement can also be applied directly to jazz in Switzerland.

Metamorphosis/Osmosis/Symbiosis

Okay, Switzerland is small and quaint, and the trains run on schedule, and the chocolate is delicious, and the banking secrecy is a national sanctuary, etc. As the non-EC country amid the EC is still too often perceived as an accumulation of clichés, it comes as no surprise that a critic from abroad might panic with «fears of cowbell and lederhosen music» at the very mention of the words Switzerland and jazz. Besides the fact that authentic folk music has nothing in common with the familiar oompah kitsch and can very well be used as a source of inspiration, as for instance Hans Kennel demonstrates with his alphorn quartet Mytha (a compilation of recordings from 1991 and 1993 is available under the title «How It All Started» on hatOLOGY 648), the majority of Swiss jazz musicians are not a bunch of stubborn country yokels, but open-minded contemporary people who have not surprisingly been hooked into the international data flow since the beginning.

In his 1970 essay «Diskurs in der Enge» («Discourse Restricted») Paul Nizon lamented over the provinciality of Swiss art. Tempi passati. Firstly, rebellion against this narrowness has led to a critical cosmopolitan view; secondly, you can discover the world in the provinces; thirdly, Switzerland is an ideal place to shuttle back and forth between urban thrills and idyllic retreats; fourthly, you can leave quickly and inexpensively (however, in doing so you shouldn’t ignore your ecological conscience). It is the smallness of the country that is an invaluable advantage to the jazz scene: a lively exchange between language regions, cantons and cities, which guarantees a stimulating mishmash of mentalities, does not necessitate passing across time zones. Thanks to the great efforts in railway and tunnel construction (keyword NEAT: New Transalpine Railway), everything has moved even closer together since December 9, 2007: it now takes the trumpeter Manuel Mengis, for instance, who made an international audience sit up and listen to his Gruppe 6 and the album «Into The Barn» (hatOLOGY 627), just under one hour to ride from Visp in the canton of Wallis, where he lives as a part-time mountain guide, to Bern, and two hours to Zürich, saving him a good hour in travel time. Plus, Switzerland’s national cultural policy is at least to some extent worthy of its name and leaves some breadcrumbs for the jazz scene, too. After the New Yorker avant-garde club Tonic was closed down, guitarist Marc Ribot, torn between anger and despair, was quoted in Village Voice as saying: «It’s time for New York to support what I do, what we do. Why is what is possible in Vienna and Bern not possible here?»

All things considered, jazz in Switzerland to me seems much less a closed session than it is in New York. Whereas in the Big Apple improvisers race around in circles, albeit often on an indisputably high and standard-setting artistic level, musicians over here are aware that it is necessary to draw inspiration regularly from outside, too, in order to prevent the music from turning sour: metamorphosis through osmosis and symbiosis. Most of our musicians nowadays learn the instrumental skills in the jazz departments of state-approved music academies, and with federalism still being kept high in Switzerland there’s no lack of training centres. The academisation of jazz certainly also has its dark sides (e.g. uniformisation). Which poses the question where on earth are all these graduates supposed to play, is there even an audience out there for so much jazz made in Switzerland, yet I suppose that hardly anyone will deny that this academic education provides fertile ground where exceptional talents (including of course also those without a diploma) sprout better than on parched wasteland.

Flowers, not Bullshit

Of course even in the Swiss jazz garden most flowers will look familiar. However, those who seek will certainly also find peculiar, nay, unique, dazzlingly fragrant blossoms. To avoid getting lost in the labyrinths of the wide Swiss jazz garden it’s best to follow the advice of specialists with a fine nose, e.g. Werner X. Uehlinger, who has been releasing great recordings of contemporary jazz off the beaten mainstream track on his HAT HUT Records label for more than three decades. The fact that since 2005 Uehlinger has released not less than five CDs by Swiss musicians of the younger generation* makes one prick up one’s ears, for he’s certainly not a Swiss patriot running a small business, but an unerring music lover who thinks in global categories and has produced albums by US iconoclasts, such as Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor, Horace Tapscott, Paul Bley, Richard Grossman or Ellery Eskelin, as well as figureheads of the European scene (Vienna Art Orchestra, Franz Koglmann, Max Nagl, etc.). The first HAT HUT recording with Swiss participation – a duo with Irène Schweizer and Rüdiger Carl – dates back to 1978 and of all titles is called «The Very Center Of Middle Europe». Until the mid-nineties about three dozen other albums by Swiss groups, or with Swiss participation, had followed (among others, «Arrivederci Le Chouartse» by Favre/Francioli/Portal, Urs Blöchlinger’s «Neurotica», solo recordings of Fritz Hauser, Urs Leimgruber and Christy Doran, or several albums by the group Habarigani). What came next was, as it were, the lull before the storm.

150 years ago Baudelaire wrote in his cycle of poems «Flowers of Evil»: «Music often takes me like a sea!» With these words as my motto, I flew across the big pond to obtain an opinion from an independent expert, and naturally also so as not to be suspected of nepotism. The Canadian cultural journalist Juan Rodriguez has been writing about jazz since the late 60s and lives in Montréal where the world’s biggest jazz festival takes place in the summer. After the monster event I talked to an exhausted yet still lucid critic about Swiss jazz in general and the five HAT HUT releases in particular. Even though Rodriguez’ judgement derives from a non-representative sample, I believe he gained amazing insights from the external perspective of the explorer:

«Swiss jazz is for me a huge discovery – very enjoyable and refreshing. The Americans have a big problem with their jazz tradition: How to overcome the immortals? The Swiss don’t seem to have those hang-ups. Their music is totally non-derivative and yet based on a very keen study of what came before, they avoid the clichés because they know them. There’s a sense of surprise and less emphasis on the Bebop vocabulary than in the US. The music is not claustrophobic, it leaves you time to think about what you’re hearing, there’s no show-boating, but a lot of clarity. The emotions are linked with the intellect, you can hear their brains having fun. The musicians have a good bullshit-detector. HAT HUT is a great label, it is more adventurous and more outward-bound than ECM, I think the mission of this label is to present another kind of Third Stream music. The young Swiss groups match up with the rest of the catalogue, they play new and very carefully considered music and the programming of the discs is exceptionally good with its ebbs and flows. This music gives me a totally different feeling than any other form of jazz.»

 
 
 
 
Manuel Mengis Gruppe 6, Into The Barn (hatOLOGY 627)
Was awarded the second highest star rating in the US jazz magazine Down Beat and was characterised with the following words, among others: «Imagine the Vandermark 5 jamming with Miles Davis’ Cellar Door Band, or Bill Dixon sitting in with Soft Machine.»

 
 
 
 
Colin Vallon Trio, Ailleurs (hatOLOGY 636)
Another piano trio. The CD made it into the «Disques d’Emoi» selection of the French Jazz Magazine. A Down Beat article under the title «Piano Trios Herald the Future of Continental Jazz» reads: «A few years ago groups like Sweden’s E.S.T. and Norway’s Tord Gustavsen Trio were attracting most of the attention, but more recently some younger trios have been honing a more focused, rigorous sound. (...) You can get a slight whiff of ECM-style pastoralism here, but it seems like Vallon, bassist Pat Moret and drummer Samuel Rohrer are more concerned with pop concision and meticulously registered emotion than atmospherics.»

   
   

 
Hat Hut Records Ltd.
P.O.Box 521, 4020 Basel, Switzerland