Remembering Ralph Towner

The guitar great and longtime ECM artist passed away on Sunday at age 85

I was downstairs in our home this past Saturday, going through my personal archives in a vain attempt at trying to bring some kind of order to the 50 years of magazines, newspapers and assorted clippings stored in a dozen or more plastic milk cartons and crates in our cramped oil tank room of the basement. And to alleviate the tedium, I decided to pop on a CD on an old boom box that I keep down there in the storage room to entertain myself whenever I was doing the kind of mindless, repetitive work that always takes me back to the two summers that I put in on the assembly line at American Motors in Milwaukee. That place really prepped me withstanding endless hours of sloughing through mindless, repetive work. So what CD did I randomly choose out the literally hundreds of advanced CDs stacked up in that same cramped storage room? I chose Ralph Towner’s 2006 ECM album, Time Line, picked randomly amongst piles of CDs sprawled out and stacked vertically on a table. It was like plucking a single card out of a full deck in a magician’s sleight of hand trick, and it immediately put me in a transcendent space.

The next day I woke up to a majestic snowy Sunday in Connecticut, every bit as beautiful as any ECM album cover ever was. And then, in a twisted bit of synchronicity, the sad news hit that Ralph Towner had passed. The genre-defying guitar great died in his longtime home of Rome, Italy at the age of 85. And for the rest of that Sunday afternoon, our home was flooded with the radiant spirit of Ralph through his music, thanks to our 5-CD disc player, which I loaded up with Towner classics on ECM. First, I replayed the gorgeous solo album Time Line, which included Ralph’s timeless piece “If.”

I followed that with 1993’s Oracle, his duet with bassist Gary Peacock (which has just been reissued on vinyl by ECM). Next up was Towner’s dreamy duets with Sardinia-born trumpeter Paolo Fresu on 2009’s Chiarascuro (I had once seen the two explore their duet chemistry together in an intimate private concert at the Italian Cultural Institute in Manhattan). That breathtakingly beautiful CD was followed by 2013’s Travel Guide, Towner’s intricate lattice work pattern collaboration with fellow guitarists Wolfgang Muthspiel and Slava Grigoryan. And finally, I played Towner’s swan song, 2023’s At First Light.

Listening to all of this incredibly beautiful guitar music made me reflect on the many times that I had seen Ralph Towner perform over the decades. The first time came 50 years ago, on Oct. 10, 1976 at the Amazingrace Coffeehouse in Evanston, Illinois, about a 90 minute drive from my home in Milwaukee. I regularly made the pilgrimage to this hippie haven during the mid ‘70s to see everyone from Jethro Burns, John Hartford, Norman Blake and Peter Lang to Jack DeJohnette’s Directions with John Abercrombie, the Gary Burton Quartet and the Pat Metheny Group (though inexplicably, I never made it down to see the Bill Evans trio, Charles Mingus, Keith Jarrett or McCoy Tyner there). Towner was playing with Oregon that first time I caught him at “The Grace.” I saw him there the following year in his captivating duet with Abercrombie in the wake of their transformative 1976 ECM album, Sargasso Sea.

After moving to New York in 1980, I would see Towner perform several times, mostly at The Bottom Line. One of my first encounters there came on May 1, 1981 when Ralph appeared with his duet partner Abercrombie, performing material from their recently released ECM album Five Years Later. They returned to that hallowed venue in the Village on Oct. 1, 1984, opening for the Jan Garbarek group with Eberhard Weber, Bill Frisell and Michael DiPasqua.

I caught Towner again at The Bottom Line on Aug. 17, 1985, this time with Oregon (featuring Paul McCandless, Glenn Moore and Trilok Gurtu) and then again with Oregon at the same venue the following year, on July 11, 1986. Oregon returned to The Bottom Line in trio form (with McCandless and Moore) in 1992, 1998 and 2002, and I was there for each one. Then several years later there was that unforgettable night at The Jazz Standard on Feb. 16, 2017, when Towner performed solo renditions of “My Foolish Heart,” his jubilant, choro-flavored “Dolomiti Dance,” “Always By Your Side” and Abercrombie’s “Ralph Piano Waltz” to a full house packed with guitar players.

In 1997, I had the distinct pleasure of writing liner notes for Bill Bruford’s If Summer Had Its Ghosts, with Towner and bassist Eddie Gomez. On the tune “Thistledown,” Towner plays guitar and overdubs piano. And on “The Ballad of Vilcabamba,” he overdubs synthesizer. The interaction between Towner, Gomez and Bruford throughout that album on Robert Fripp’s Discipline Global was spirited and remarkable.

Nearly 10 years later, I conducted a lengthy phone interview with Ralph, from his home in Rome, in December 2016 for a piece in the Spring 2017 issue of Jazziz magazine that focused on his latest ECM release at the time, My Foolish Heart.

Ralph Towner’s latest album — his 30th overall for ECM and sixth solo outing for the label — is an intimate gem brimming with luminous melodies (“Pilgrim, “I’ll Sing To You,” “Two Poets”) and contrapuntal brilliance (the lively, choro-like “Dolomiti Dance,” the buoyant “Saunter”) that showcases his pristine classical technique and searching spirit on 6-string nylon and 12-string steel acoustic guitars. There’s also a bluesy meditation, “Blue As In Bley,” in tribute to the late pianist and free jazz pioneer Paul Bley, who died a month before the session took place at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in February 2016. But the soulful centerpiece here is Towner’s transcendent take on the Victor Young standard “My Foolish Heart,” title song of the album and one closely associated with pianist Bill Evans, whose impact on the 76-year-old guitar master is immeasurable. In a phone chat from his home in Rome, Towner talked about his early endeavors as a jazz pianist in Manhattan, his discovery of guitar, his longstanding relationship with the band Oregon, his rare recording with Weather Report in 1972 and the perils of checking an instrument with the airline on trans-Atlantic flights.

Bill Evans seems to have been a muse for you throughout your career. You’ve recorded his “Blue in Green” in the past and also “Some Other Time,” another tune associated with him. You have a tune on your album Anthem you have a tune called “Very Late,” which is based on Bill’s “Very Early.” And it continues with your version of “My Foolish Heart” on this new solo album.

Yeah, I chose that song to record because it had such a big effect on me when I first heard that version on Sunday at the Village Vanguard with the Trio (Evans on piano accompanied by Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums). Basically, that whole recording had a big influence on me and all my peers too. Almost everyone was influenced by the way that trio related to each other. So it’s kind of a tribute to record this tune, especially on a guitar solo version, which I’m quite pleased with. There’s also a little bit of irony in it since I had a pacemaker put in about two and a half years ago. So I thought calling the album My Foolish Heart was an appropriate title for therecording…with a little dark humor from me.

There’s a line in the excellent new Bruce Spiegel documentary Time Rememberedwhere Bill says in an interview, “I have a reason to arrive at every note I play.”

Yeah, great. I’ve said that before, actually. I don’t know if I can be that confident about it, but that’s my intent. Especially in composition. I mean, when you can sit and craft a tune that you’re going to improvise on, or even a completely written thing…every note has a reason for being there. And when you alter one thing in a composition or in an improvisation, which is sort of instant composition, it will alter what’s going to succeed that note eventually. It’s like you’re writing a history that’s dictating itself and becomes more and more somehow limited to what you can say. The further you get, the more defined the identity of the piece gets, and it grows historically until it’s finally wrapped up and finished. But if you really want to keep a consistentstory going in your music as you’re playing it, every note has to be really have intent somehow and not just be fooling around.

Can you detail your approach on “My Foolish Heart”? Were you thinking pianistically? Were you thinking of counterpoint in particular? What were you going for?

I was thinking about the entire trio, basically. In talking about the influence Bill has, you can’t leave out what he did in response and in conjunction with Scott LaFaro. That was the impact. And I don’t know if he was really able to continue that depth until he got to his trio with Marc Johnson (in 1978). and finally started rediscovering that magic again. And what that is, for me, is the relationship of that trio with each other. So what I’m trying to do musically when I’m playing a standard like that, I’m playing very pianistically but I’m also paying attention to the bass line, obviously to the voice leading…and this is all very much a product of that trio. It’s not only about Bill but how three people interact. I’m always trying to present music in a way where it’s not one guy showing off one thing; rather, the music itself, for me, sends an effect that it’s being manufactured by several people and not just necessarily with counterpoint but with a whole atmosphere. In other words, it’s bigger than just the person playing it.

When I hear your version of “My Foolish Heart” and something like “Rewind,” which has this real swinging energy to it and also a lot of counterpoint, I’m hearing a Joe Pass-ian concept — that idea of bass lines, chords and melody simultaneously. Was he at all an influence on you?

Not really, no. I wasn’t that into guitar players, to tell you the truth. I knew the more modern guitar players, of course. Scofield, Abercrombie, McLaughlin and I lived within a three square block range of each other in Manhattan at one point, and we all played together in jam sessions and things. But electric guitar players, that’s another instrument, really. Classical guitar really is a kind of a child of the piano. It descends from the lute and other instruments that are plucked with all the fingers of the right hand, which enables you to control all the volume and length of the different notes…to really have a lot more control. And as I say, the tradition is pianistic and from Baroque time and pre-Baroque Renaissance stuff. So my whole thing is, I’m a piano player, really, and was pressing that really strongly at one point because of this whole incredible impact that Bill and Scott and Paul had on me back in 1961. And when I bumped into this classical guitar, I thought, “What a fascinating instrument!”

When did you begin playing guitar in earnest?

I was just graduating from college with a composition degree and I realized, “Well, if I’m really going to play that instrument I’m going to have to do it very seriously and with great discipline and not just teach myself a few things about it.” So I asked my professor at the University of Oregon where a master classical guitar teacher that I could study with might be, and he recommended Karl Scheit in Vienna. I hardly knew where Vienna was on the map and I didn’t realize how far it was, but I managed to get myself to Vienna and start studying as a beginner on the guitar at 22 years old. And that’s all I did for a while. I locked myself in a room and woodshedded all day. I was living in a single little room and just practiced like eight to ten hours a day every day for a year while also studying with this great teacher. So I made up for a lot lost time with this incredible crash course. That’s become my main instrument, really. But it’s really born from the piano, not really from guitar playing, per se.

Did you actually see the Bill Evans Trio play during that week of the live Sunday at the Village Vanguard recording in 1961?

No, not that time. I finally did see him on my way to Vienna. I had to go through New York and then figure out how to get from there to Europe to begin my studies with Karl Scheit. I found this Icelandic airline that cost like $80 to fly to Luxembourg and then I hitchhiked from there to Vienna. But first I took a Greyhound bus from Bend, Oregon all the way to New York City. I had this flop house hotel for two or three nights right near Times Square and I managed to get down to the Village Vanguard to hear Bill. At that time, Gary Peacock was playing with him. And little did I know that Gary and I would have such a great run together as a duo later on (appearing on Towner’s ECM albums Oracle in 1993 and A Closer View in 1995). But I heard that trio and man, it was just heaven! After I got to Vienna, I didn’t touch the piano or the first year because I knew I had this driving thing that I had to concentrate on that one instrument, the classical guitar.

Were you gigging as a pianist in New York?

When I moved there, yeah, absolutely. By the time I moved to New York in 1968 I was quite a good piano player…played with a lot of different people. Whenever Chick Corea had an extra wedding gig he wasn’t going to take, he would call me. And he also called me to take his place with Stan Getz. I also worked with Freddie Hubbard…many others. I played around New York as a second-call piano player. At that time you had to know your bebop and history of the music to be noticed in New York City, and I did really quite well as a piano player, as far as breaking into that culture.

Do you remember some of the venues you played at as a piano player?

Yeah, my first gig was at a place called Check’s Composite in the Village, which I don’t think exists anymore. That was a duo thing. And then I played at several Upper East Side music places. But nothing that famous really in terms of clubs. I never made the Vanguard but I used to work in Bradley’s a lot. Bradley (proprietor Bradley Cunningham) really liked my piano playing so I worked duo there with different bass players like Miroslav Vitous and George Mraz and Glen Moore. As a piano player, I survived, basically. And that place kept me afloat. Plus, living in New York then was easy. My apartment was in the West Village right on Perry Street and Bleecker and it cost like $110 a month. See, in those days, musicians could afford to live in Manhattan and we had a lot of time to get together and develop this new music that was happening with groups like Weather Report and McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra and Oregon (the group Towner formed in 1971 with bassist Glen Moore, sitarist-percussionist Colin Walcott and oboist Paul McCandless). So that was a real great time to be in New York.

I remember Dave Liebman telling me that his rent was like $85 a month. So you play a gig or two and you had the whole month covered, which left the rest of the month to jam and experiment with music.

Exactly! That’s what it was all about then. In fact, Leibs and I played with Jimmy Garrison. We had a group together. The year before that, Jimmy had called me to play at the Jazz Mobile up in Harlem and the horn player on the gig was Gato Barbieri. They’d tow up this little trailer with a piano on it and a speaker system and you’d do a concert in the street in the middle of Harlem. Anyway, Jimmy was so proud of that group. I think I actually played a couple of pieces on guitar too at that concert in the street. But then Jimmy disappeared and sold his bass and didn’t show up until a year later, and that’s when he called Liebs and I and a drummer whose name I can’t remember about forming this band. We did some rehearsals and were getting ready to do another gig, and then he disappeared again. So I only did the one gig in Harlem with him. Anyway, a lot of things happened around that time. I even played duets in the middle of the night with Sonny Rollins at an underground loft club that saxophonist George Braith had called Musart. George really liked my playing and he did a lot for me in terms of recommending me for different gigs. But he called me in the middle of the night and said, “Come down, Sonny Rollins is here all by himself and he needs to play. Come down and play with him.” There were so many little things like that happening around that time. And slowly you built up your reputation until it’s almost like you have this magic calling card saying that you were able to cut it on the piano with some notable jazz players. So I had a good reputation that I built up by playing the piano. I have a funny background. I actually started on the trumpet when I was seven years old and I was quite good at it. Everyone was astounded that I could improvise at such a young age. Later on I played trumpet with Oregon. You can hear my trumpet playing on a lot of those Oregon albums. We just finished our 30th album but I don’t play any trumpet on it. I can’t get a sound out of a trumpet now. I think my teeth aren’t quite right for it anymore.

One of the things that has become a signature of yours over the years is the 12-string guitar, which is represented on the new recording by “Clarion Call” and “Bidding Time.” It’s such a distinctive, great-sounding instrument.

The particular one I have now was made especially for me back in 1976. Guild made two of them for me. They’re made out of rosewood. But the airlines make it impossible now to travel with more than one guitar so I’m not bringing a 12-string on this upcoming tour. I have to check my guitar and hold my breath when I travel now. It’s in a travel case, but things happen. One of my favorite guitars with had gotten smashed after I did a solo concert in Brazil. They wouldn’t let me take the guitar on board on the flight from Brazil back to Rome, so I had to check it. And when I opened up the case when I got back home, the guitar had been completely destroyed. I mean, it was opened like a can or tuna…rolled back. The front had split from the body so youcould actually peak inside of it. Anyway, it looked like it was done for but I had a great repairman in Palermo — a guitar maker and violin restorer — and he put it back together. It sounds great now but it wasn’t quite ready when it came time for this recording. So it’s done on a different guitar.

Was there any particular inspiration for you to get into 12-string?

I wasn’t planning on ever playing a 12-string guitar. No classical guitarist in their right mind would want to play a steel string guitar because it’s a little harder on your fingernails, which is your picks on all of your fingers of your right hand. But then I worked with the Paul Winter Consort and he had this nice 12-string Guild guitar and he wanted so badly to play this particular tune…I think it was a Joni Mitchell tune. So I agreed finally and I started improvising on 12-string in his concerts. I would usually do something that would sound like a Renaissance piece because it sounds so much like a harpsichord because the way I played it was not strumming it but playing it like a classical guitar and controlling all the notes. So it sounded very much like a keyboard and so I kind of got hooked on that sound and before I knew it I started trying some wild tunings —- tuning every string to a different note and not just in octaves or unisons. And when I started recording with (ECM producer) Manfred Eicher, we did some pieces on the 12-string. Somehow, Wayne Shorter had gotten wind of this strange thing I was doing with that instrument. He was thinking about forming this group and he had heard about me from Miroslav Vitous, who had played some gigs with me and mentioned me to Wayne. And this is like two years before Weather Report formed. So Wayne called me and we got together at his apartment and just spent the afternoon playing tapes of our music and him showing me stuff he was writing for Blue Mitchell, a great trumpet player on Blue Note. Anyway, it was an amazing afternoon because he was so poetic and such a unique individual. It was exciting and he was really into what I was doing. And, of course, I was interested in what he was doing. He was a real hero. So we spent a great afternoon together and two years later he called me again and I ended up playing this 12-string solo for a tune on Weather Report’s second album, I Sing the Body Electric. So I’m the only guitar player ever to play with Weather Report, which is a real honor somehow. And that happened because of the general atmosphere of the times. I think it was the creative juices that were flowing in New York City at the time that allowed some of these odd combinations and new music to be developed. But that’s the way things were then — a lot of money with the record companies and a lot of time and very low cost of living in New York. I mean, what more could you ask for? It was an amazing time.

None of which is happening now.

No, but still I think music keeps getting driven further and further underground and it always surveys and grows. It’s like mushrooms, it’ll grow in the darkness in spite of the economy or the prejudice or whatever.

You mentioned that you once lived in Palermo and now you’re in Rome. When was the last time you lived in the States?

Well, I guess it’s over 20 years now. Amazing, huh? I had a house that I owned for quite a while up until 12 or 13 years ago….in Seattle. I never lived in a house like that before. I moved out there, I left New York just to be near my daughter, basically. when she was growing up. I gave it a try living in this house…it was out there just to be in the vicinity of my daughter, who lived in Porltand. But it was with plants and trees all growing wildly around it. I couldn’t keep up the maintainence…I couldn’t keep up with it, and I’d go on tour a lot, I was touring all the time. And I’d fly all the way to Europe and do these tours and come back and the place would just be overrun with ivy and trees. Finally I just sold it. I wrote some nice pieces there, though, A lovely house. But I have no business owning and maintaining a house.

Didn’t you live Woodstock at some point?

No, not at all. The connection with Woodstock, I’m afraid, is through one of these flukey situations. When I first moved to New York City a lot or us were taking gigs with folk singers and there was one guy who always hired jazz musicians named Tim Hardin. He hired me. I think Glenn Moore introduced us. So he hired me and Glenn to play what I thought was a little folk festival up in Woodstock, and this little folk festival turned out to be Woodstock. And Paul Motion was playing there too with Arlo Guthirie, so we had that common. Here we were a bunch of jazzers playing in Woodstock. And of course, it was astounding. We had to be flown in by helicopter, we didn’t know that when we were driving there. Anywhere I have that thing on my resume. But I never wanted to live outside of Manhattan because I had rent control.

Your new recording sounds amazing. I know you recorded it in an auditorium in Lugano. Why does it sound so good?

The auditorium is in the Swiss radio station. All the European radio stations are huge. They’re like big movie lots. Unbelievable.

So the acoustics of that room accounts for the brilliance of the sound of this album? Or is that all Manfred?

Well, that’s one reason why Manfred likes to record there, because it has a nice sound. But a space won’t make you sound good. If you sound good, it will amplify that. But if you don’t sound good, it’s not going to do you any good. Anyway, that room is really beautiful sounding for classical music. And there’s no amplication, of course, just a lot of microphones. But a lot of reason for the sound too is Manfred. We’ve always used a minimum of four microphones — three surrounding the guitar, then another one way back in the room to get the ambient sound. So the positions of the microphones, which Manfred determines, are very important. Then mixing between the qualities of each of those microphones is how he gets his signature ECM sound.

This is you’re 20th album for ECM. And, of course, all of them were done with Manfred Eicher producing. So by now you two must have some kind of telepathic shorthand in the studio.

Oh absolutely. Well, he kind of has that approach with everybody. I remember from the beginning there was very little talking going on between the engineer and Manfred, or on the talk back. He likes to keep this atmosphere of a simple kind of silence…as long as a musician knows what they’re doing. And, of course, you only have like two days to record, tops. And every record I’ve ever done with Manfred, including Blue Sun, the one-man band recored in which I play all the instruments and did all those overdubs, it’s still done in two days. So I had to get all the overdubbed French horn parts and trumpet parts right on the first try. Or we’d had to live with it. And what that does to your playing, when you have a limited amount of time, it’s actually a benefit. Because that way, you’re very selective about what you play and you’re also very present, because you can’t mess up your concentration about thinking you can fix it later. That kind of thinking, or just thinking period, takes you out of what you’re actually doing and playing…the moment that you’re in. So there’s that interesting aspect of having this limit on the amount of time you have to record. It’s not like a concert because they’re not recording. But I mean, one of the nice things about that…at first it’s a little terrifying to realize you’re essentially playing live in the studio. But I have a little technique for when I’m playing something from ECM for a friend and I know there might be something coming up where there’s a clam. Just about the time it’s about to come up I’ll say, “Would you like a cup of coffee?” And then they don’t have to hear the clam. Whether they would’ve recognized it or not is a whole other thing. But that routine with the coffee or a very well placed cough usually works. A well camouflaged clam will serve you very well.