In Memoriam: Ralph Towner, 1940–2026

By Michael J. West I Jan. 19, 2026

The success of Oregon’s first album, 1971’s *Music Of Another Present Era*, allowed Towner to establish a solo career.
(Photo: Paolo Soriani/ECM)

Ralph Towner, a guitarist and composer who blended multiple genres, including jazz — and throughout them all remained a purebred devotee to acoustics — died Jan. 18 at a hospital in Rome, Italy. He was 85. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Celeste Towner, who did not specify a cause. Sources told the Italian news organization Agenzia Italia that the guitarist had recently been hospitalized for unnamed health problems.

Towner was probably best known as a founding member of Oregon, an ensemble that in the 1970s proffered an idiosyncratic fusion of jazz, folk, psychedelia and European and Indian classical musics. However, throughout his association with Oregon — which lasted nearly 50 years — Towner maintained a steady career as a solo artist, the entirety of it on the German label ECM Records.

While many, even most, jazz guitarists experimented with the tonal and textural possibilities of the electric guitar, Towner couldn’t be bothered. “I never liked the electric guitar,” he explained in a 1975 interview. “I’m not on an anti-electric campaign or anything. … I’m just not drawn to it.” This limited his performing career to fairly intimate contexts where his instrument wouldn’t be drowned out by either amplification or crowd noise. It was a challenge in the arena-driven business of 1970s jazz fusion, but Towner persevered on his own terms.

“I’ve been more obsessive than I’ve been curious,” he told Premier Guitar of his musical conception. “That obsession with wondering, ‘Where does this piece of music go next?’ It’s like writing a story. But I wouldn’t define that as curiosity. Because you’re being curious about something that doesn’t exist.”

Ralph N. Towner was born March 1, 1940, in Chehalis, Washington, to Milo Towner, a planing mill worker, and Bernice Caverly Towner, a church organist and piano teacher. His father (who had also played trumpet) died when Ralph was 3, and the family moved to Bend, Oregon.

Ralph took an interest in both his parents’ instruments, but it was as a pianist that he matriculated at the University of Oregon in 1958. While a student there, he met Glen Moore, a self-taught bassist, and began jamming with him. He also heard a fellow student playing a classical guitar and was intrigued by it, enough so that upon graduating in 1963 he relocated to Vienna, Austria, and studied at the Vienna Academy of Music with guitar master Karl Scheit.

Moving to New York in 1969, Towner reunited with Moore and the two joined saxophonist Paul Winter’s Consort, a “folk jazz” ensemble that also included oboist Paul McCandless and drummer-sitarist Colin Walcott. This lineup helped to create Winter’s album Icarus, a seminal recording in world fusion (and what would come to be called “new age music”). At the same time, however, those four musicians began exploring on their own, developing in 1971 the band Oregon, with a softer, more introspective approach to jazz fusion than had been heard at the time.

The success of Oregon’s first album, 1971’s Music Of Another Present Era, allowed Towner to establish a solo career. He performed as a sideman with Weather Report in 1972, and the following year recorded (with accompaniment from his Oregon bandmates) a solo debut album, Trios/Solos, which would be the first of over two dozen recordings as a leader. Many of these also featured Solstice, a quartet featuring German bassist Eberhard Weber and Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek and drummer Jon Christensen. He also continued touring and recording with Oregon through 2018, a constant in the band through the departures of Walcott (who died in a car crash in 1984) and Moore (who retired in 2017).

Towner settled in Italy in the 1990s, where he married actress Mariella Lo Sardo in 1994. He is survived by Lo Sardo as well as his daughter, Celeste, from his first marriage to Janet Towner.

Towner’s final recording, At First Light, was a solo guitar album, recorded in Switzerland in 2022 and released the following year on ECM Records. DB