Book excerpt: Irène Schweizer: jazz pianist, activist, icon. Left-winged, lesbian, autonomous. The path of a young woman from the northern Swiss province leads further and further into experimental music: from London's jazz club Ronnie Scott's and the Zurich Africana Club to the avantgarde-stages in Wuppertal, Berlin, Willisau, Chicago and New York, and from concerts with Don Cherry, Louis Moholo and George Lewis to solo appearances as the leading pianist of European jazz in the Swiss temples of high culture, the Lucerne Culture and Congress Center and the Tonhalle Zurich. Again and again she fights for artistic freedom and autonomy.