It was not for a lack of talent that Ralph Towner never quite matched the profile of fusion’s elite. Commercially, it could be argued that the Washington-born jazz man, who passed in January at the age of 85, was held back by his chosen instrument.
“I never liked the electric guitar,” he said of his nylon-string leanings in a 1975 interview. “I’m not on an anti-electric campaign or anything. I’m just not drawn to it.”
Creatively, however, what seemed like a stubborn stipulation ultimately made Towner one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from the New York scene of the early ’70s.
Article continues belowBorn in March 1940, and captivated by overhearing the lessons given by his piano‑teacher mother – his mill-worker father also played trumpet – it was as a self-taught classical pianist that Towner made his first mark at the University Of Oregon in the late ’50s.
There, he told Guitarist in 2023, his head was turned by the guitar: “I heard a student playing a classical piece, probably Bach. I can’t remember the piece, but it was just the beauty of the instrument and the resemblance to a keyboard. It didn’t enter my mind that this was going to be my major instrument. But when I heard the guitar it struck me.”
After graduating in 1963, Towner wrote a begging letter to the Vienna Academy of Music’s Karl Scheit (sometimes dubbed the ‘Segovia of Austria’). Though penniless and unaware that the school was in Europe, he made the crossing and impressed the famed guitar instructor with his audition.
The next few years would be spent practising and studying “in a tiny room, seven days a week”, before Towner returned to New York, joining Paul Winter’s Consort band to play on the saxophonist and world music pioneer’s highly influential Icarus album (1972).
Running alongside their work with Winter, the Consort line-up had their own ideas, which took glorious flight as Oregon, a collective that began in 1970 and endured until the various band members’ deaths and retirements forced its dissolution in 2019.
The early Oregon albums – in particular, 1972’s Music Of Another Present Era – hold a special kind of magic, Towner’s eloquent, rippling touch often softer and more emotive than the fusion scene’s alphas, though no less technical (revisit the unfathomable cascade that opens The Rough Places Plain).
In any case, Towner argued in Anil Prasad’s book Innerviews: Music Without Borders, what he played was often as much a surprise to him as it was to us.
“Writing is like reading for me. Similar to when I start a book, if the material reaches out and grabs me, I’m pulled along just like a reader is, wondering where the piece is going to go. In that way, I’m almost a member of the audience, seeing how the piece will unfold.”
Even Oregon’s wide remit – across 30-odd albums, the group alighted on Indian ragas, English folk, Brazilian bossa nova, intergalactic jazz and out-there psychedelia – wasn’t a broad enough canvas for Towner.
He struck out as band leader with 1973’s Trios/Solos, played everything from 12-string to gong on the following year’s solo debut Diary, then went on to guest with everyone from Bill Bruford to Robben Ford.
The quality and breadth of his output was fabled in his own small-ish pond. Yet Towner always distrusted anything that came between his fingers and the strings of his Ramírez.
“The thing about amplification, although it’s improved so much over the years, is that it’s always sustaining beyond the dynamics of what you’re playing,” he told us. “It doesn’t really sound like your sound that much.”
This practical roadblock – coupled with his reluctance to neatly embrace a single genre – inevitably kept his shows smaller than they might have been and his profile just a faint blip on the mainstream radar.
But you only had to scan Towner’s career moves to know it was never about fame. Settling in Rome, where he practised every day until his recent hospitalisation, he remained curious and questing to the last, a player whose life’s work tested the limits of the guitar in every direction, and who came closer than most to solving its riddles.
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