Trios / Solos (2023 Remaster) Ralph Towner

• 1Brujo05:41
• 2Winter Light03:39
• 3Noctuary02:26
• 41x1202:51
• 5A Belt Of Asteroids06:41
• 6Re: Person I Knew06:21
• 7Suite: 3x12 - I02:07
• 8Suite: 3x12 - II02:19
• 9Suite: 3x12 - III02:54
• 10Raven's Wood05:23
• 11Reach Me, Friend03:26
• Total Runtime43:48

Info for Trios / Solos (2023 Remaster)

Occasionally accompanied by oboist Paul McCandless and by Colin Walcott on tabla, Ralph Towner’s first recording on ECM, in collaboration with bassist Glenn Moore, demonstrates the guitarist in various chamber musical settings, improvising sketches as well as more elaborate musical forms with capable counterparts. When the album was released in 1973, the German weekly Die Zeit described the pieces as “modern jazz poems - full of beautiful metaphors and reflections, suggesting moods, awakening feelings.” Down Beat: This is a simply stunning record – direct and beautiful. It has the appearance of delicacy, but there’s not a moment of fragility.”

Essentially an Oregon album under a different name, Trios/Solos consists mainly of Ralph Towner originals culled from the group’s Vanguard sessions. The opening “Brujo” is anchored by Towner’s twelve mighty strings and the late Collin Walcott’s tabla stylings, leaving a winding crevice through which Glen Moore works his whimsical bass. “Noctuary” features Paul McCandless on oboe, soaring loosely through the Towner/Moore fulcrum before the trio ties itself into a tightly improvised not. The Bill Evans tune “Re: Person I Knew” stands out in a gorgeous rendition. Towner doubles on piano and 12-string—laying down a sound that would soon crystallize into his classic ECM album Solstice—as Moore lurks in the background. “Raven’s Wood” continues the same configuration, only this time with nylon, darkening its pastoral modality with nocturnal visions.

Despite the intimate wonders of these trios, the album’s titular solos abound with some of its most focused and furthest-reaching moments. Moore’s “A Belt Of Asteroids” is a curious one at that. Seeming at first out of place in its present company, it carefully peels open the album’s outer layers with every twang. The remainders feature Towner doing what he does best. Take the compact “Suite: 3×12,” a carefully thought out composition in which his palpable picking and love for harmonics shines through at every turn, not to mention his consistently progressive energy. The last of the three movements is more aggressive in its attack and wound around a precise rhythmic core. “Winter Light” is heavily steeped in 6-string nostalgia, lonely but content in its solitude. “1×12” is, by contrast, a run along a blazing trail. Lastly, we have “Reach Me, Friend,” a snapshot of expectation that breathes with audible resolve.

As the driving force behind the album, Towner’s technique is mellifluous as usual, forging an aerial sound that constantly surveys the untouched lakes shimmering below like mirrors in the brilliance of his execution. Despite the lush performances throughout, the imagery is all so viscerally sere. And while there is no danger in what we see, there remains a threat unseen, lingering just beyond the horizon, quelled only by the arrival of the morning sun.

"Towner was, in the 1970s and early '80s, the consummate ECM artist. His classical six-string and 12-string guitar playing lent itself well to Manfred Eicher's aesthetic. This abum is an odd collection of solos and trios, all played with the members of his band, Oregon (which included the late Colin Walcott of Codona). The album features Towner with Glen Moore and Walcott on the opener "Brujo," a driving piece for 12-string and tabla with Moore's bass forging the bridge between rhythm and melody. Towner is still full of verve and ambition here, still trying to prove to himself that it is possible to touch the infinite with music. A number of these tracks are taken from Oregon's Vanguard albums, and some of them are new originals. Also included is a stunningly beautiful cover of Bill Evans' "Re: Person I Knew," with Towner doubling on guitar and piano, and Moore playing a pizzicato bassline worthy of Scott LaFaro. If anything, Towner overly sweetens the piece with his piano playing -- it seems he lacks Evan's gift for understatement -- but he more than compensates in the harmonic changes in the middle section of 16 measures with his 12-string. Moore is solid throughout, swinging like hell. Another notable track is the free improvisation of "Noctuary," where Towner and oboist Paul McCandless go head to subtle head, moving through timbres, pitches, and octaves like they were spokes on a wheel. While Trios/Solos has its moments of pure unadulterated noodling yawn, there are more than enough dimensions where the four elements meet and spark to compensate." (Thom Jurek, AMG)

Ralph Towner, twelve-string guitar, classical guitar, piano (tracks 1-4 & 6-9)
Glen Moore, bass (tracks 1, 3, 5, 6 & 8)
Paul McCandless, oboe (tracks 3 & 8)
Colin Walcott, tabla (track 1)

Recorded November 27–28, 1972 at Sound Ideas Studios, NYC
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Digitally remastered by Christoph Stickel

Ralph Towner
Musical innovation is no easy feat. It not only requires an innate talent, but also a devotion to the art that is not blinded by the commercial glare of the popular culture. Ralph Towner is such an innovator on the modern musical landscape, his ideas ever fresh, though they span a career of more than forty years.

Best known as the lead composer, guitarist, and keyboardist for the acoustic jazz ensemble "Oregon", Towner has also had a rich and varied solo career that has seen fruitful and memorable musical collaboration with such great modern musicians as Gary Burton, John Abercrombie, Egberto Gismonti, Larry Coryell, Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, and Gary Peacock.

Towner was born in Chehalis, Washington on March 1st, 1940 into a musical family, his mother a piano teacher and his father a trumpet player. Towner and his siblings were raised in a nurturing and empowering environment that encouraged free musical experimentation and expression. In 1958, Towner enrolled in the University of Oregon as an art major, later changing his major to composition. He soon thereafter met bassist Glen Moore who would become a lifelong musical partner in the band Oregon.

It was about this time that Towner discovered the early LPs of Bill Evans, whom Towner emulated and whose influence he began to incorporate into his own piano style and composition. It was not much longer until Towner also bought a classical guitar on a lark and became entranced enough with the instrument that the early 1960s saw him heading to Vienna to study classical guitar with Karl Scheit. In 1968 Towner moved to New York City and immersed himself in the New York jazz scene, eventually landing a position with the Paul Winter Consort where the friendships and musical partnering with Glen Moore, Paul McCandless, and Collin Walcott were forged, a musical chemistry which was destined to alchemize into the band Oregon. Paul Winter also bestowed Towner with his first 12-string guitar. Towner has since coaxed the 12-string into imbuing his work with such a characteristic uniqueness that most jazz fans, given the two keywords "12-string" and "jazz" would immediately blurt the name Ralph Towner.

Towner's working relationship with producer Manfred Eicher of ECM Records began in 1972 and would provide a forum for his growth as a leader and collaborator with other jazz giants, all while concomitantly breaking open musical frontiers with Oregon throughout the intervening years. ECM's roster of low-volume acts was decidedly contrary to the amplified popular zeitgeist of the era, and provided Towner an opportunity to connect and create with some of the more iconoclastic and innovative artists of the musical culture in the 1970s. Towner's ECM years also saw his most minimalist, yet most bold, endeavor. "Solo Concert", released in 1980 on ECM, was conceptually elemental, a solo live guitar recital. Yet, no one to date had ever synthesized classical contrapuntal composition with improvisational and oddly-metered jazz like this before, especially in such a risky arena as a live performance. Such solo work would later become Towner's signature on recordings such as "Ana" and "Anthem", or augmented only by Gary Peacock's bass on "Oracle" and "A Closer View".

Like any true artist, however, experimentation with technology was simultaneously and paradoxically leading Towner away from this bare-bones approach to composition and performance in 1983 when he began to incorporate the Prophet 5 keyboard synthesizer into his compositions, both with Oregon and his ECM recordings. The Prophet 5 afforded an entirely new dimension to his writing, as well as to the brazen and quirky character of the "free-form" improvisatory pieces for which Oregon had become infamous.

Just as Towner's solo career has seen evolution, his partnership with Oregon would likewise undergo transformations as one might anticipate that any enduring relationship might do. Sadly, in 1984, percussionist Collin Walcott and manager Jo Härting were killed in Germany in a collision involving Oregon's tour bus. Towner and McCandless escaped serious injury in the back of the vehicle. The emotional scars would however be deep, and it at first seemed doubtful that Walcott's critical contribution to Oregon's musical tapestry, lost so tragically, could ever be resurrected by any replacement. Time would luckily find that the intent of Oregon's musical message was vehement enough to again find spontaneous expression after grief. Two subsequent world-class percussionists of a like mind, and gifted with rhythmic virtuosity, Trilok Gurtu in 1992 and Mark Walker in 1997, would share in and expand on Oregon's vision. That vision would explode in an epic way in 2000 upon release of "Oregon in Moscow", an orchestral double-CD recorded with the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra, earning the ensemble four Grammy nominations.

Towner's creativity and virtuosity into the new millennium retain all the vitality of his younger years, even now into his 70s. Always in service to the music, he continues to have a knack for fostering new musical relationships with those who share a mission to synergize art into a sum greater than its parts, recently and most notably with Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel and Australian guitarist Slava Grigoryan, a trio colloquially known as "MGT." Likewise, his later jazz duos with Italian trumpeter Paolo Fresu and Argentine clarinetist Javier Girotto have reaffirmed his unique niche in the international world of improvisational jazz. Ralph Towner has come full circle with the 2017 release of "My Foolish Heart," his 26th recording for ECM records, and an homage to the jazz pianist who inspired Towner on his original quest for compositional innovation, Bill Evans.

This album contains no booklet.