# Ralph Towner is an innovator on the modern musical landscape: Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2018/03/01/ralph-towner-is-an-innovator-on-the-modern-musical-landscape-video/
- Published: 2018-03-01T00:04:52+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**01.03. – Happy Birthday !!! 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 forty 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.

Towner’s creativity and virtuosity into the new millennium retain all the vitality
of his younger years, even now into his 70s. Always in service to the music, he 
continues to have a knack for fostering new musical relationships with those who
share a mission to synergize art into a sum greater than its parts, recently and
most notably with Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel and Australian guitarist
Slava Grigoryan, a trio colloquially known as “MGT.” Likewise, his later jazz duos
with Italian trumpeter Paolo Fresu and Argentine clarinetist Javier Girotto have
reaffirmed his unique niche in the international world of improvisational jazz. 
Ralph Towner has come full circle with the 2017 release of “My Foolish Heart,” his
26th recording for ECM records, and an homage to the jazz pianist who inspired Towner
on his original quest for compositional innovation, Bill Evans.

![Related image](https://i0.wp.com/www.abc.net.au/radionational/image/5012252-3x2-
600x400.jpg?resize=600%2C400)

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