RALPH TOWNER

Ralph Towner (b. Chehalis, Washington, March 1, 1940) is an American acoustic guitarist. He also plays piano, synthesizer, percussion and trumpet. Born in 1940 in Chehalis, Washington, Towner has made notable recordings of jazz, classical music, folk music, and world music. He began his career as a conservatory-trained classical guitarist, then joined world music pioneer Paul Winter's "Consort" ensemble in the late 1960s. Along with bandmates Paul McCandless, Glen Moore, and Collin Walcott, Towner left the Winter Consort in 1970 to form the group Oregon, which over the course of the 1970s issued a number of highly influential records mixing folk music, Indian classical forms, and avant-garde jazz-influenced free improvisation. At the same time, Towner began a longstanding relationship with the influential ECM record label, which has released virtually all of his non-Oregon recordings since his 1972 debut as a leader Trios/Solos. Towner has also made numerous appearances as a sideman, perhaps most famously on jazz fusion heavyweights Weather Report's 1972 album I Sing the Body Electric.

Unlike most jazz guitarists, Towner eschews amplification, using only 6-string nylon-string and 12-string steel-string guitars. As a result, he tends to avoid high-volume musical environments, preferring small groups of mostly acoustic instruments that emphasize dynamics and group interplay. Towner also obtains a percussive effect (e.g., "Donkey Jamboree" from Slideshow with Gary Burton) from the guitar by weaving a matchbook among the strings at the neck of the instrument. Both with Oregon and as a solo artist, Towner has made significant use of overdubbing, allowing him to play piano (or synthesizer) and guitar on the same track; his most notable use of the technique came on his 1974 album Diary, in which he plays guitar-piano duets with himself on most of the album's 8 tracks. In the 1980s, Towner began using the Prophet V synthesizer fairly extensively, but has since deemphasized his synthesizer and piano playing in favor of guitar.

Towner now lives in Rome, Italy.

The Bill Evans Influence

Born into a musical family, his mother a piano teacher and his father a trumpet player, Towner learned to improvise on the piano at the age of three. He started trumpet lessons at the age of five, but did not take up guitar until attending the University of Oregon, where he also studied composition with Homer Keller. He first played jazz in New York City in the late 1960s as a pianist and was strongly influenced by the renowned jazz pianist Bill Evans. He began improvising on classical and 12-string guitars in the late 1960s/early 1970s; formed alliances with musicians who had worked with Evans, including flautist Jeremy Steig, bassists Eddie Gomez, Marc Johnson, Gary Peacock, and drummer Jack DeJohnette;

Major collaborations

Oregon
Marc Johnson
Jan Garbarek
Eberhard Weber
John Abercrombie
Gary Burton
Gary Peacock

Detailed list of recordings as a leader

Trios/Solos (1972) — co-leader with Glen Moore
Diary (1974)
Matchbook (1975) - co-leader with Gary Burton
Solstice (1974)
Sargasso Sea (1976) — co-leader with John Abercrombie
Solstice - Sound and Shadows (1977)
Batik (1978)
Old friends, new friends (1979)
Solo Concert (1979)
Five years later (1982) - co-leader with John Abercrombie [out of print]
Blue Sun (1983)
Slide show (1986) - co-leader with Gary Burton
City of eyes (1989)
Open letter (1992)
Oracle (1994) - with Gary Peacock
Lost and found (1996)
Ana (1997)
A closer view - with Gary Peacock
Anthem (2001)
Time Line (2006)
From a Dream (2008) - with Slava Grigoryan and Wolfgang Muthspiel

For a list of major Oregon recordings, please consult the group's entry.

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Musical innovation is no easy feat. It not only requires an innate talent, but also a devotion to the art that is not blinded by the commercial glare of the popular culture. Ralph Towner is such an innovator on the modern musical landscape, his ideas ever fresh, though they span a career of more than thirty years. 

Best known as the lead composer, guitarist, and keyboardist for the acoustic jazz ensemble "Oregon", Towner has also had a rich and varied solo career that has seen fruitful and memorable musical collaboration with such great modern musicians as Gary Burton, John Abercrombie, Egberto Gismonti, Larry Coryell, Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, and Gary Peacock.

Towner was born in Chehalis, Washington on March 1st, 1940 into a musical family, his mother a piano teacher and his father a trumpet player. Towner and his siblings were raised in a nurturing and empowering environment that encouraged free musical experimentation and expression. In 1958, Towner enrolled in the University of Oregon as an art major, later changing his major to composition. He soon thereafter met bassist Glen Moore who would become a lifelong musical partner in the band Oregon. 

It was about this time that Towner discovered the early LPs of Bill Evans, whom Towner emulated and whose influence he began to incorporate into his own piano style and composition. It was not much longer until Towner also bought a classical guitar on a lark and became entranced enough with the instrument that the early 1960s saw him heading to Vienna to study classical guitar with Karl Scheit. In 1968 Towner moved to New York City and immersed himself in the New York jazz scene, eventually landing a position with the Paul Winter Consort where the friendships and musical partnering with Glen Moore, Paul McCandless, and Collin Walcott were forged, a musical chemistry which was destined to alchemize into the band Oregon. Paul Winter also bestowed Towner with his first 12-string guitar. Towner has since coaxed the 12-string into imbuing his work with such a characteristic uniqueness that most jazz fans, given the two keywords "12-string" and "jazz" would immediately blurt the name Ralph Towner.

Towner’s working relationship with producer Manfred Eicher of ECM Records began in 1972 and would provide a forum for his growth as a leader and collaborator with other jazz giants, all while concomitantly breaking open musical frontiers with Oregon throughout the intervening years. ECM’s roster of low-volume acts was decidedly contrary to the amplified popular zeitgeist of the era, and provided Towner an opportunity to connect and create with some of the more iconoclastic and innovative artists of the musical culture in the 1970s. Towner’s ECM years also saw his most minimalist, yet most bold, endeavor. “Solo Concert”, released in 1980 on ECM, was conceptually elemental, a solo live guitar recital. Yet, no one to date had ever synthesized classical contrapuntal composition with improvisational and oddly-metered jazz like this before, especially in such a risky arena as a live performance. Such solo work would later become Towner’s signature on recordings such as "Ana" and "Anthem", or augmented only by Gary Peacock’s bass on "Oracle" and "A Closer View".

Like any true artist, however, experimentation with technology was simultaneously and paradoxically leading Towner away from this bare-bones approach to composition and performance in 1983 when he began to incorporate the Prophet 5 keyboard synthesizer into his compositions, both with Oregon and his ECM recordings. The Prophet 5 afforded an entirely new dimension to his writing, as well as to the brazen and quirky character of the "free-form" improvisatory pieces for which Oregon had become infamous.

Just as Towner’s solo career has seen evolution, his partnership with Oregon would likewise undergo transformations as one might anticipate that any enduring relationship might do. Sadly, in 1984, percussionist Collin Walcott and manager Jo Härting were killed in Germany in a collision involving Oregon’s tour bus. Towner and McCandless escaped serious injury in the back of the vehicle. The emotional scars would however be deep, and it at first seemed doubtful that Walcott’s critical contribution to Oregon’s musical tapestry, lost so tragically, could ever be resurrected by any replacement. Time would luckily find that the intent of Oregon’s musical message was vehement enough to again find spontaneous expression after grief. Two subsequent world-class percussionists of a like mind, and gifted with rhythmic virtuosity, Trilok Gurtu in 1992 and Mark Walker in 1997, would share in and expand on Oregon’s vision. That vision would explode in an epic way in 2000 upon release of "Oregon in Moscow", an orchestral double-CD recorded with the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra, earning the ensemble four Grammy nominations.

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Ralph Towner was born in Washington state in 1940, moved to Oregon at age five and grew ap there. He began to improvise at the piano at age 5, imitating recordings from the WW II era. The Towner family were all musicians, and instruments from the brass, string and woodwind groups were all represented in the family orchestra. Ralph began formal study on trumpet, and began playing in dixieland, swing and polka bands at age seven. Although his mother was a piano teacher and church organist, he declined to study the keyboard and continued as a self-taught pianist/improviser.

He studied classical composition at the University of Oregon, graduated in 1963 and went to Vienna, Austria to study classical guitar, an instrument he discovered in his fourth year of college. He studied for a year under the renowned Professor Karl Scheit, returned to the University of Oregon for graduate studies with professor Homer Keller, then returned for a second year of study in Vienna. He then moved to New York City in 1968 to continue his career as guitarist-pianist-composer in earnest. In 1980 he added the keyboard synthesizers to his instrumental arsenal. 

Since 1970 he has recorded over thirty albums under his own name and has collaborated in concert and/or recording with Keith Jarrett, Weather Report (Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter), Egberto Gismonti, Gary Burton, John Abercrombie, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette, Jan Hammer, Eddie Gomez, Elvin Jones, Freddie Hubbard, Oregon, Paul Winter Consort, to mention a few. 

He has won numerous awards, including two German Grammies (Deutsche Schallplatten Preis) for the best jazz recording of 1976 world-wide, (Solstice, with Jan Garbarek, Eberhard Weber, and John Christenson), and again in 1988 for Ecotopia with the group "Oregon" (Paul McCandless, Glen Moore, Trilok Gurtu), a U.S. Grammy nomination, the Downbeat magazine poll as guitarist, and the New York Jazz Award as best New York City acoustic guitarist among them. He has performed world-wide in Asia, Africa, South America, Eastern and Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Japan and North America; in jazz clubs and major concert halls such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Berlin Philharmonic Hall, Vienna's Mozartsaal, etc. Towner has recorded over one hundred of his instrumental compositions. His numerous orchestral compositions have been performed by the Stuttgart Opera Orchestra, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, and the Freiburg Festival Orchestra. His recent symphony was commissioned and performed by the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra and by the Philadelphia Orchestra. He has also published a book on improvisation and performance techniques for classical guitar, a solo suite for classical guitar, and composed and conducted a large work for string quartet, wind quartet and synthesizers commissioned by a grant from the AT&T-Rockfeller foundation. He recently completed a score for an Italian film, Un'altra Vita, by Carlo Mazzacurati. 

His compositions have been used by various dance companies and choreographers including Alvin Ailey, Pilobolus and Murray Louis. He has composed the scores for various documentary films and was honored by Apollo astronauts who carried his music on cassette to the moon and officially named two moon craters after two of his compositions, "Icarus" and "Ghost Beads". His most recent record releases are: Always, Never, and Forever, with the group "Oregon" on Intuition Records; a new solo recording for ECM entitled Open Letter that includes Peter Erskine on percussion; and Oracle, a duet on ECM with bassist Gary Peacock.