Ralph Towner, a guitarist, pianist and composer whose work, both solo and with the long-running ensemble Oregon, synthesized jazz, classical and various international traditions into a highly personal language that won him a devoted following, died on Sunday in Rome. He was 85.
His daughter, Celeste Towner, confirmed the death but did not specify the cause. Mr. Towner had been living in Italy since the early 1990s.
In the early 1970s, at the height of the jazz-fusion era, Mr. Towner emerged with a virtuosic yet intimate style on albums under the ECM Records label, a leading exponent of progressive jazz. He would record for the company for the rest of his life, releasing more than two dozen albums, many of them featuring him on solo acoustic guitar, both classical and 12-string.
“There’s something about having the freedom to basically direct the music yourself,” he said of unaccompanied playing in an interview with JazzTimes in 2017. “Guitar is such a good solo instrument; there’s a sense of playing an ensemble kind of music, but on your own.”
His work on the instrument carved a genre-transcending path.
Reviewing a 2006 release, “Time Line,” in The New York Times, Nate Chinen wrote, “Mr. Towner has perfected a solo-guitar style of exceptional fullness and warmth; throughout his long tenure on the ECM label, and with the world-fusion ensemble Oregon, he has applied his pristine technique to every kind of malleable purpose.”
Oregon debuted in 1971, coming together while the members were working in a band led by the saxophonist Paul Winter. The group, in which Mr. Towner played piano as well as guitar and was its primary composer, would be another constant throughout Mr. Towner’s career. Its other longtime members were the bassist Glen Moore and the woodwind player Paul McCandless.
“This is a very thrilling group to be involved in,” Mr. Towner told the music website Innerviews in 2000. “We can play everything from the 12-tone tradition to atonal-sounding music to polkas to tangos to anything else you’ve run across. We can somehow ingest it in some way and have it come out as something we’ve made our own.”
Ralph Towner was born on March 1, 1940, in the small city of Chehalis, Wash., about 90 miles southwest of Seattle. The youngest of five children, he grew up hearing his mother, Bernice (Caverly) Towner, a piano teacher and church organist, giving lessons in the family’s home. His father, Milo, a trumpet player, died in World War II.
Mr. Towner started out improvising at the piano but began studying the trumpet after moving with his family to Bend, Ore. He played duets with his mother and gained early experience in swing, polka and Dixieland bands.
He discovered a talent for improvising while playing along with a school ensemble on a plastic whistle. “I had an ear for it,” he told DownBeat. “I knew how it worked.”
He studied composition at the University of Oregon, where he met Mr. Moore, and also started playing jazz piano, inspired by hearing Bill Evans’s trio.
Seeing a fellow student playing a Bach piece on classical guitar prompted Mr. Towner to pick up that instrument as well. After graduation, he sought out Karl Scheit, a renowned Austrian guitarist and teacher, and moved abroad to study with him.
“I managed to get to Vienna, and then I locked myself in a tiny little room and practiced and studied for seven days a week,” he told Guitar World.
Mr. Towner moved to New York in 1968 and there met musicians who would become enduring collaborators, among them the fellow guitarist John Abercrombie. Mr. Towner played at Woodstock in 1969, backing the folk singer Tim Hardin along with Mr. Moore. Later, on a Hardin session, Mr. Towner and Mr. Moore met the tabla and sitar player Collin Walcott, who had studied with both Ravi Shankar and the master percussionist Alla Rakha. All three soon joined the Paul Winter Consort.
During his time with the Winter group, Mr. Towner began playing 12-string guitar and wrote key pieces in the Consort’s repertoire, including “Icarus,” the soulful and inviting title track to a 1972 album.
In New York, Mr. Towner met Wayne Shorter, the celebrated saxophonist and composer, through the bassist Miroslav Vitouš. Later, after Mr. Shorter and Mr. Vitouš formed the jazz-fusion group Weather Report, Mr. Towner made a celebrated cameo on their 1972 album “I Sing the Body Electric,” adding scintillating 12-string guitar to “The Moors,” a piece by Mr. Shorter.
During an era when electric instruments were prevalent in jazz, Mr. Towner remained devoted to the acoustic guitar. In 1975, he told Guitar Player that he “wasn’t even remotely interested in playing the electric guitar.” (“It’s a valid instrument,” he added. “I’m just not drawn to it.”)
While still working with Mr. Winter, Mr. Towner joined with Mr. Moore, Mr. Walcott and Mr. McCandless, whose instruments included oboe and saxophones, in jamming on their own and then making their first recording together (though it went unreleased for a decade). They made their live debut as a group in 1971 under the name Thyme — Music From Another Present Era, but soon decided to change it.
“Glen and I would always talk about how beautiful Oregon was; it felt so distant and fantasy-like,” Mr. Towner told Innerviews in 2017. “So Paul said, ‘We’re Oregon.’”
As heard on early albums like “Music of Another Present Era” (1972), which was nominated for a Grammy for best jazz performance by a group, Oregon honed a seamlessly hybridized sound, combining the precision and intimacy of chamber music with the improvisational dexterity of jazz. Indian music and other international traditions were influences. In 1978, the critic Robert Palmer wrote in The Times that “it is easier to define what Oregon isn’t than to say just what it is.”
As Oregon was on the rise, Mr. Towner met the founder of ECM, Manfred Eicher, at a performance in which Mr. Towner was playing with the bassist Dave Holland. Mr. Towner debuted on the label in 1973 with “Trios/Solos,” which featured appearances by Mr. Moore and other Oregon members. He would remain an ECM artist for the next 50-plus years.
His recordings for the label included duet collaborations with Mr. Abercrombie, the vibraphonist Gary Burton and the bassist Gary Peacock; recordings with the quartet known as Solstice, featuring the saxophonist Jan Garbarek, the bassist Eberhard Weber and the drummer Jon Christensen; and unaccompanied releases such as “Solo Concert,” a virtuoso live effort from 1980 that summed up Mr. Towner’s way of combining introspective moods with bravura technique.
Mr. Towner performed alone on many of his recordings. As Will Layman observed in a PopMatters review of Mr. Towner’s 2017 release “My Foolish Heart” — titled after the jazz standard he had first heard in a rendition by the Bill Evans Trio — “Towner is a tiny orchestra unto himself.”
Mr. Towner moved to Italy in the early 1990s, settling first in Palermo and then in Rome, after meeting the actress Mariella Lo Sardo at an Oregon concert in Palermo. They married in 1994. (He and his first wife, Janet Towner, had divorced.)
In addition to his daughter, Celeste, from his first marriage, his wife survives him, along with his former wife and Phoenix Siewert, the son of his daughter’s longtime partner.
Oregon continued to record and perform prolifically, with Mr. Towner, Mr. McCandless and Mr. Moore carrying on for decades with different band members after the death of Mr. Walcott in 1984 in a tour-bus crash.
“The reason we continue is strictly because the music keeps improving,” Mr. Towner told Innerviews. “If the music wasn’t good, we would have stopped quite awhile ago.”
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