Ralph Towner Achieves a Milestone

By Dan Ouellette I Jun. 20, 2023

“When things go right, it’s like dipping your hands into a nice sink of water,” Towner says of “Empty Stage,” from his new album, *At First Light*.
(Photo: Caterina Di Perri)

After more than 30 years of living as an expatriate in Italy, the amiable Ralph Towner is sitting comfortably at his spacious home that he shares with his longtime wife — theatrical and film actor Mariella Lo Sardi — in Rome’s Via Giovanni De Calvi neighborhood. He’s in his studio apartment-sized workroom, with his two acoustic classical guitars on stands near a piano and electric keyboards.

In a gray sweater and blue jeans, Towner, who just turned 83, takes great pleasure in reminiscing about his mid-1940s childhood as a musical prodigy and then jumping ahead to his new album, At First Light, a brilliant classical guitar solo affair.

“I like having conversations in English,” Towner says warmly. “I miss the language living here. My Italian is terrible. I guess it’s serviceable, but the grammar is difficult. You can easily say the wrong vowel and you end up calling somebody something wrong.”

He laughs heartily and says, “But I do know how to tell a musical story on my guitar that will transport you.”

Towner’s 25th album as a leader (not counting the sizable catalog of the exploratory acoustic fusion band Oregon that he co-founded with Glen Moore in 1970) is an evocative outing that marks his 50th year recording for his ECM Records home base. It also stands as his seventh solo album that journeys into his vast palette of orchestral tonal colors and a rich harmonic sensibility.

On the 11-song program of At First Light, Towner elevates on improvised originals like the thematic opening tune, “Flow,” and covers like “Danny Boy” where he honors the legacy of Irish folk music. “It’s one of the most beautiful songs in the world,” he says.

Even though Towner continues to “mess around with my guitars” to create new voyages into what one observer describes as a “tiny universe unto itself,” he senses that At First Light could very well be a milestone of his career. He writes in the album’s liner notes: “The blend of keyboard and guitar technique is an important aspect of my playing and composition, and I feel that this album … is a good example of shaping this expanse of influence into my personal music.”

What’s the essence of “Flow” that opens the show?

“That’s been my entire life,” says Towner, who was born in 1940 as the fifth of five children into a musical family in the small rain-soaked lumber town of Chehalis, Washington. “The flow has had its own direction, and it’s held together. That’s the hope of this whole life of music that I’ve had from birth.”

Towner says he soon developed a good ear for improvising music. His mother — who lost her husband, her father and her oldest son in World War II combat in a span of just two-and-a-half years — moved him and one of his sisters to the 9,000-population town of Bend in central Oregon.

“This was jewel of a town that had two elementary school music departments with a symphony, a concert band and a chorus,” he says. “One day while we were performing a piece of music in class, I started improvising on this little plastic whistle. I wasn’t playing parallel. I was doing the moving voices. I had an ear for it. I knew how it worked.” Instead of getting into trouble, Towner was recognized as a special player who was allowed to improvise counter melodies at age 8 during concerts where he played trumpet and baritone euphonium.

This led Towner to eventually study the piano in a classical setting at the University of Oregon, where he got his diploma in music composition. It was a chance encounter with a psychology student practicing classical guitar that made the difference. “It just struck me,” Towner says. “I was 20, 21 and I thought, ‘I’ve got to get one and try to learn it by myself.’ It was a difficult instrument, and I realized I had to drop everything and study this with a master.” He asked a professor at UO if he knew anyone who could fit this bill. Bingo: Karl Scheit at the Vienna Academy of Music.

Towner studied there for two years, returned to Oregon and then to sharpen his chops, went back for more Scheit guitar studies. He dropped into New York in 1968 for a spell, playing small bars and jam sessions, meeting likeminded guitarists like John Abercrombie and John Scofield. He was a session support player for Freddie Hubbard and even hung with Wayne Shorter for a stretch that resulted in him playing on Weather Report’s tune “The Moors” on its 1972 recording I Sing The Body Electric.

It was in this vibrant setting that, through an introduction by ECM artist Dave Holland, Towner met Manfred Eicher, who was in the early stage of launching his aesthetically advanced label. He asked Towner to come to Munich, and in two days they recorded his first album, Diary, played on 12-string guitar and piano in a nod to his musical hero Bill Evans. Fifty years later, Towner and Eicher are still working together.

As for what he was going to record for the new album, Towner says he had some time to think that through, even if it was a strange process. “I’ve been exposed to the incredible world of music from day one,” he says. “I slowly collected songs like rolling around in a pile of leaves in wet clothes. Everything is sticking to you slowly. It’s amazing how much music a person is exposed to and how it alters your life.”

Returning to “Flow,” Towner says, ”It’s a collective piece where everything flows into it so that it doesn’t sound like I’m struggling with the instrument.”

Towner ends his journey with ”Empty Stage,” another improvisation based on a classical duet he wrote. “This to me is being immersed in my instrument to the place where I get lost in it,” he says. “It’s a thing of beauty. When things feel right, it’s like dipping your hands into a nice sink of water. … It’s the wonderful world that I was brought into from birth.” DB