Ralph Towner has died at the age of 85! Towner was an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger and bandleader. Among other things, he mastered the twelve-string guitar, classical guitar, piano, synthesizer, percussion, trumpet and French horn.
Towner was born into a musical family in Chehalis, Washington, United States of America, on March 1, 1940. His mother was a piano teacher and his father a trumpeter. Towner learned to improvise on the piano at the age of three. He started out as a classical pianist, conservatory-trained, and between 1958 and 1963 he attended the University of Oregon, where he also studied composition with Homer Keller. Between 1963 and 1964 and again between 1967 and 1968 he studied classical guitar at the Vienna Academy of Music with Karl Scheit.
In the late ’60s he joined the Consort, an ensemble led by ‘world music’ pioneer Paul Winter. In the late ’60s he also played jazz for the first time in New York, as a pianist. In that period he developed under the strong influence of the famous jazz pianist Bill Evans. In the late ’60s and early ’70s he began improvising on classical and 12-string guitar and connected with musicians who had worked with Evans. They were: flutist Jeremy Steig, bassists Eddie Gómez, Marc Johnson and Gary Peacock, and drummer Jack DeJohnette.
In 1970, Towner left the Winter Consort together with Paul McCandless, Glen Moore and Collin Walcott and founded the band Oregon, which released a string of influential albums in the seventies that blended folk music, Indian classical forms and avant-garde, jazz-inspired free improvisation. At the same time, Towner began a long-running relationship with the ECM label, which released practically all of his recordings made outside of Oregon, following his debut as a bandleader, Trios / Solos, in 1973.
In 1984 tragedy struck the band when Walcott died in an accident while traveling on a tourist bus. The event threatened the future of Oregon. But they pushed on. With the arrival of percussionists Trilok Gurtu and Mark Walker, they reaffirmed themselves and reached a peak with the ambitious album “Oregon in Moscow” (2000), recorded together with a symphony orchestra.
Towner appeared as a sideman on Weather Report’s album “I Sing the Body Electric”, released in 1972. On his 1975 solo album “Solstice”, which included the popular piece Nimbus, he showed off his skill and versatility to the fullest on the 12-string guitar.
In later years Towner collaborated with artists such as Wolfgang Muthspiel, Slava Grigoryan, Paolo Fresu and Javier Girotto. His 2017 release “My Foolish Heart” on ECM closed out his journey. With that album he paid tribute to Bill Evans, who had always been seen as the catalyst of Ralph Towner’s musical insight.
From the early ’90s Towner lived in Italy, first in Palermo, then in Rome. He died in Rome on January 18, 2026, at the age of 85.
