Towner strings together quite a career
Ralph Towner is a different sort of guitar hero. There is no plectrum plucking for the man who introduced both classical and 12-string guitar to jazz back in the 1970s, a time when John McLaughlin and other rock-influenced guitar stars were electrifying jazz via fusion.
There is also the fact that Towner didn't even pick up the instrument until he was 22 and wrapping up his degree in classical composition from the University of Oregon. He'd started off on trumpet at age 7, and switched his focus to piano when he got to college.
``I'd been playing the piano, working as hard as I could to be exactly like Bill Evans," recalls Towner, 66, by phone from Rome, where he has lived for three years with his wife, the Italian actress Mariella Lo Sardo . ``And I discovered the guitar."
Classical guitar, that is; the instrument he'll be playing solo (as well as his 12-string) at the Regattabar Tuesday , celebrating the release of his latest solo CD, ``Time Line." Towner says he hadn't paid any attention to classical guitar until he heard someone playing it at Oregon, and playing it beautifully.
``A light bulb went off," he says. ``I managed to get hold of a classical guitar, and realized that in order to play it well, you need a really great teacher. I kind of convinced myself immediately that I wasn't going to waste a lot of time being self-taught, and I really wanted to learn in the classical fashion."
The teacher Towner chose was the Austrian classical master Karl Scheit , which meant moving to Vienna. Traipsing off to a foreign country to learn an instrument at age 22 might strike some as impractical, but there were no authority figures available to argue the point with Towner: His father died when he was 3, his mother when he was 20.
That Towner fell for and wanted to pursue classical guitar didn't surprise Glen Moore, a classmate who played bass in their Evans-inspired piano trio in college and who has performed beside Towner the past 36 years in the group Oregon.
``Ralph felt there was something else," Moore says. ``He didn't really love bebop in the way that a lot of people do. It wasn't his main love. It was more the incredible beauty and clarity of the piano with the bass, where there was this flexibility in the harmony that could be altered by what either of the people did."
The 12-string was added to Towner's arsenal after he'd spent some time gigging around New York on piano and guitar. By 1970, he'd joined the Paul Winter Consort, and Winter had a 12-string he wanted Towner to try playing.
``I think a Joni Mitchell piece, probably it was," recalls Towner. ``She always had a particular sound with the 12-string, and in fact I suppose that might have a lot to do with the way I started to play with a lot of tunings and things. But I still finger like a classical guitar, which was very strange. I mean, it gave it a more powerful sound and [made it] able to do things that you never had heard on a 12-string before, because it's traditionally a plectrum instrument."
The elements of Towner's distinctive guitar sound were now in place. Towner, Moore, Paul McCandless , and Collin Walcott split from Winter's group to form Oregon in 1970. The band's 1999 CD ``Oregon in Moscow," recorded with the Moscow Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra, earned four Grammy nominations.
Meanwhile, Towner has maintained a separate solo career with ECM Records. ``Time Line" was recorded in the church at an Austrian mountain monastery and features mostly Towner originals -- many of them inspired by imagery of the Sicilian countryside, Towner and his wife having lived in Palermo for several years before their move to Rome. There are also two standards that Towner associates with Evans. Three essential influences on Towner's work -- Evans, classical guitar, and Brazilian music -- linger to this day.
``It's a good combination of training that I put together," Towner says. ``It just happened to fall together -- the kind of talents that I have and the kind of study that I did kind of add up to this thing. And being a composer is maybe the most important thing -- the fact that I write so much of what I play gives it also another chance to be a little bit more individual than normal."
Ralph Towner performs solo guitar at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Regattabar.
Tickets $20. Call 617-395-7757 or visit www.regattabarjazz.com.
