Formed 1970

Oregon built a sound out of instruments that had no business sitting together in a jazz group: tabla and twelve-string guitar, oboe and upright bass, sitar and French horn. The quartet, Ralph Towner, Glen Moore, Paul McCandless and Collin Walcott, came together through Paul Winter's Consort and spent the 1970s on Vanguard refining a chamber music that drew as much from Indian classical tradition and European composition as it did from jazz improvisation, documented across "Music of Another Present Era" (Vanguard, 1972), "Distant Hills" (Vanguard, 1973) and "Winter Light" (Vanguard, 1974). A move to ECM in the early 1980s sharpened the approach further on the self-titled "Oregon" (1983) and "Crossing" (1984), the latter completed shortly before Walcott's death in a bus accident later that year. The group continued for decades afterwards under various lineups, but it's this original quartet's run, especially the Vanguard catalogue, that defines what collectors look for.