Guitar and Piano | 1940-2026

Ralph Towner approached the guitar like a pianist who'd taken a wrong turn, and the wrong turn became one of the most distinctive sounds in jazz. Classically trained at the University of Oregon and later in Vienna under Karl Scheit, he brought a contrapuntal density to the twelve string and nylon string guitar that no one else in the idiom had, often proving the point directly by overdubbing himself on guitar and piano on the same track, a technique he introduced on his solo debut "Diary" (ECM, 1974) and returned to for decades. He co-founded Oregon in 1970 alongside Glen Moore, Paul McCandless and Collin Walcott, and a year later met ECM's Manfred Eicher, beginning an association that ran the rest of his life and produced landmark records including "Solstice" (1975), the Jan Garbarek and Eberhard Weber session widely credited with first defining the ECM sound, and the Gary Burton duo album "Matchbook" (1975). Towner died on 18 January 2026 in Rome, aged 85.