Ralph Towner with Oregon at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, Half Moon Bay, California, April 30, 1989
Towner was born into a musical family in Chehalis, Washington, United States.[1] His mother was a piano teacher and his father a trumpet player. Towner learned to improvise on the piano at the age of three. He began his career as a conservatory-trained classical pianist, attending the University of Oregon from 1958 to 1963, where he also studied composition with Homer Keller.[3] He studied classical guitar at the Vienna Academy of Music with Karl Scheit from 1963 to 1964 and 1967–68.[1]
He joined world music pioneer Paul Winter's "Consort" ensemble in the late 1960s. 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 and early 1970s and formed alliances with musicians who had worked with Evans, including flautist Jeremy Steig, bassists Eddie Gómez, Marc Johnson, Gary Peacock, and drummer Jack DeJohnette.[4][5]
Along with bandmates Paul McCandless, Glen Moore, and Collin Walcott, Towner left the Winter Consort in 1970 to form the group Oregon,[1] which over the course of the 1970s issued a number of 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 ECM record label, which has released virtually all of his non-Oregon recordings since his 1973 debut as a leader Trios / Solos.[1]
Towner appeared as a sideman on Weather Report's 1972 album I Sing the Body Electric.[1] His 1975 album Solstice, which featured a popular track called "Nimbus", demonstrated his skill and versatility to the full using a 12-string guitar.[6]
Since the early 1990s, Towner has lived in Italy, first in Palermo and then in Rome.[7]
Technique
Towner plays only acoustic guitars, using six-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 obtains a percussive effect (e.g., "Donkey Jamboree" from Slide Show with Gary Burton) from the guitar by weaving a matchbook among the strings at the neck of the instrument.[8] Both with Oregon and as a solo artist, Towner has made 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 eight tracks.[9] In the 1980s, Towner began using the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 synthesizer extensively,[10] but has since de-emphasized his synthesizer and piano playing in favor of guitar.
