With Ralph Towner we lose a 12 string poet

Ralph Towneran American multi-instrumentalist, left us at the age of 86 in Rome, where he had moved some time ago. Towner was known as the founder of a fundamental group for contemporary jazz music, the Oregonwith which he intertwined classical music and experimentation. Among the many with whom he collaborated, we also remember the great Pino Daniele.

Ralph and Pino

The two met in 1993, when they collaborated on the album “Che Dio ti benedica”, with an instrumental piece entitled “Two Pisces in Alto Mare”, so called because both, born in March, were of the sign of Pisces. The Pino blues it was perfectly intertwined with the mastery of the Ralph’s acoustic guitarwho knew the instrument like the back of his hand.

He was born in Chehalis, Washington, where he began playing the pianobut it was the meeting with the classical guitar to change his life forever. He moved to Vienna to study and refine his technique and this allowed him to combine the European style and that of American jazz.

The Oregons

The nucleus of Oregon met within the Paul Winter Consort in the late 1960s. Ralph Towner, Glen Moore, Collin Walcott and Paul McCandless decided to break away to explore an improvisational freedom that went beyond the confines of Winter’s folk-jazz. In 1971 Oregon was officially born.

Long before the term “world music” was coined by record labels in the 1980s, Oregon were already playing it: they used oriental instruments to integrate Indian scales and rhythms into the very structure of the compositions. Their approach reflected a deep respect for the different musical cultures.

In Oregon, Towner was not only the guitarist, but the main composer. Many of his iconic songs, such as “Icarus”, were born or were brought to their maximum expression with that lineup. The group allowed him to be an “orchestrator”, using Paul McCandless’s oboe as if it were the voice of a soprano and Collin Walcott’s percussion as an ancestral beat.

The poet of the 12 strings

Although he had returned to his beloved classical guitar in recent years, he is on the 12 strings that Towner has built an identity. His musical training began with the piano, so he needed an instrument that had the same harmonic richness as the black and white keys. With its pairs of strings, the 12-string guitar offers a natural resonance and complexity of harmonics that the 6-string classical guitar cannot achieve.

That tool allowed him to create orchestral textures: while he played a melody, the other strings created a dense carpet of sound, almost as if there was an entire string section or piano in the background. Most guitarists use 12 strings with a pick: Towner doesn’t. All fingerstyleusing a technique derived from classical guitar, to have total polyphonic control.

The technical term for the 12 string effect is chorusing natural. Since it is almost impossible to tune two neighboring strings absolutely identically, micro-oscillations are created which give the sound incredible depth and spatial breadth. For Towner, this was perfect for evoking those open spaces and rarefied atmospheres typical of ECM sound (the typical sound of the German record label ECM Records, known for its reflective and melancholy jazz, with a more European approach, in contrast to the more bluesy American jazz).