Virtuoso musician and composer who was at the forefront of 1970s jazz fusion, notably with the band Oregon
For a quiet man, Ralph Towner, the American multi-instrumentalist and composer, who has died aged 85, had an impressive penchant for sharp epithets about his own creative motives.
Describing himself as a “raconteur of the abstract” was a memorable one. So was his remark in 2023, to Premier Guitar magazine, that throughout his career he felt he had generally been “more obsessive than I’ve been curious”.
Towner nurtured an unmistakable lyricism on a guitar, and his obsessiveness enabled him to tap into an imagination that kept coming up with hauntingly lyrical melodies, and revealing where their shapes might lead his improvising.
His confidence in that inner world brought a remarkable catalogue of achievements. He played New York jazz clubs as an accomplished pianist in the late 1960s, but also played the Woodstock festival on guitar with the folk-blues singer-songwriter Tim Hardin in the same period. He performed and wrote for the saxophonist Paul Winter’s folk/jazz/classical band the Winter Consort, unexpectedly finding two of his compositions for the band – Icarus and Ghost Beads – becoming the names of craters on the moon, after the Apollo 15 moon-landing crew took Winter’s 1970 album Road with them on the trip.
