Ralph Towner obituary

"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."

Ralph Towner combined deep lyricism with obsessive imagination to produce hauntingly melodic improvisations on guitar and piano. He performed as a pianist in New York jazz clubs in the late 1960s and played guitar at Woodstock with Tim Hardin. He contributed compositions to the Paul Winter Consort; two of his pieces, Icarus and Ghost Beads, were later used as crater names after Apollo 15 carried the Consort's album Road to the moon. Towner improvised a 12-string opening on Wayne Shorter’s The Moors for Weather Report, and he cofounded Oregon, blending jazz, folk, classical and world traditions into chamber-jazz.

Read at www.theguardian.com