For the past three decades, Ralph Towner has stood out among guitarists for his unique synthesis of jazz, classical, and other musical styles in his compositions for classical and 12-string guitar. He is a schooled classical guitarist and composer, yet his first love has always been improvisation, and his roots go deep into the jazz tradition. The result of his life's work is a large body of music that defies categorization. This has been a productive year for Towner, who, as a member of the *adjective ensemble Oregon, recently released Oregon in Moscow, a double CD featuring Oregon with the Russian National Orchestra (a project that earned four Grammy nominations) as well as Anthem, a solo CD that showcases his improvisational brilliance as well as his gift for composition.

Towner first came to prominence in a groundbreaking incarnation of the Paul Winter Consort in the early 1970s. With an instrumental panoply that included guitar, cello, oboe, soprano saxophone, bass, and a variety of percussion instruments, the group artfully trampled stylistic boundaries by combining jazz-tinged compositions by Towner with traditional African folk songs and classical pieces by Bach and Dufay.

In 1971 Towner, bassist Glen Moore, percussionist/sitar player Collin Walcott, and woodwind virtuoso Paul McCandless formed the group Oregon. With its vast, multicolored palette of acoustic sounds (sometimes discreetly augmented with strains from Towner's Prophet 5 synthesizer), Oregon became a concert attraction and a refreshing alternative to the pounding, electric guitar-driven sounds of 1970s jazz fusion.

In 1984, the group experienced a tragic loss when Walcott died in a car accident in Germany. The percussion seat in Oregon is presently occupied by Mark Walker, who adds his distinguished jazz and world music credentials to the mix.

In addition to his efforts with Oregon, Towner has maintained his own solo performing and recording career. He lives in Palermo, Italy, and tours annually with Oregon and in duo and trio settings with various musicians. His new CD, Anthem, exploits the many timbres and textures of his 12-string and classical guitars for maximum sonic variety. Some pieces explore dark and dense chord voicings on the 12-string, others are solitary single-line melodies on nylon-string guitar. From start to finish, the music is pure

Towner, with his distinctive chordal structures, insistent pedal tones, sprinkles of harmonics, angular rhythmic phrasing, and dramatic dynamic shadings. I caught up with Towner as he was preparing to embark on a tour of the U.S. with Oregon. He comes across in conversation much as he does in music-warm, expressive, and full of ideas.

You started playing piano and trumpet as a kid. What kind of music were you most drawn to at that time?

I started improvising on the piano when I was about three years old.

I guess improvisation has always been natural for me. I would try to imitate records. I was born in 1940, so I had a huge collection of World War II-era 78 rpm records. I had music by Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, and all of the swing bands. I had a very normal childhood and was steeped in music. My whole family was musical, so I had a great outlet for my music. We had enough instruments in the family to make up a mini-orchestra with violins, trumpets, and reeds. My mother was a church organist, pianist, and teacher. I had sort of a charmed life in that I was always encouraged and praised.

When I got older, I started playing trumpet in Dixieland and polka bands.

When did you start playing the guitar?

I didn't pick it up until my last year in university [at the University of Oregon]. It was such a fascinating instrument to me that I decided to study it very formally. So I went to the music academy in Vienna, Austria, to study with the great guitar professor Karl Scheit. I was 22 years old and a college graduate, but I started guitar as a beginner.

That was a bold move.

It was both bold and naive. If I wasn't so naive, I would have never even considered it. I lived in an outlying district of Vienna in a little $12-a-month garret. It was so poorly made that snow blew into the windows in the wintertime. All I could afford to eat was rice. For that first year, all I did was practice guitar eight to ten hours a day. I would sleep about eight hours, and the rest of the time I was at the American and English library reading everything I could get my hands on. I led a real monk's life for the year, but at the end of that time I could play classical concerts.

So you already knew some of the repertoire?

After that year I did. Before I went over to Austria, I only knew two pieces. I had meddled with things for about six months before deciding that I'd better get a teacher and not try to teach myself. It worked out better than if I had started playing guitar when I was eight. I had no money, no distractions, and very few friends in Austria. When you are young, you don't consider something like that to be suffering. In retrospect, it was pretty rough, but the result was fantastic. I was able to put together a really solid technique. Karl Scheit was a great pedagogue.

Was New York your next career move after the year in Austria?

I moved to New York City in 1968. I was a pretty good jazz pianist, so I worked as a piano player because I didn't want to try to force the classical guitar into a jazz situation. I played with [saxophonist] Stan Getz and [bassist] Dave Holland. What was nice about New York at that time was that everyone was playing with everyone else and listening to musicians from all over the world. There was a real interest in playing music that had unusual meters and in expanding the harmonic language beyond the bebop vocabulary. That time was very fruitful. It was cheap to live there then, and that fostered a lot of artistic freedom because players didn't have to do a lot of stupid gigs just to stay alive.

There was time for wonderful get-togethers and rehearsals. I would also go into the recording studio with all kinds of musicians late at night with assistant engineers who wanted to practice their trade. So I was getting free studio time and could put together any combination of instruments I wanted. I remember one session where I had Airto Moreira and both of the Brecker brothers and we were all doing this for free. I couldn't put a band like that together for free anymore.

Your harmonic approach to the guitar blends jazz and contemporary classical sounds. How did that develop?

It goes back to when I was working out my piano playing. I would reharmonize jazz standards, keeping the melodies the same but finding different chord changes. I would try to add a little magic to old tunes to keep them from going through the ii-V-I progression that is so common in jazz. I got a lot from [bassist] Scott LaFaro who played with [pianist] Bill Evans. He would select bass notes that would alter the sounds of what Bill's left hand was doing. After reharmonizing tunes for a while, I realized that

I might just as well write my own. I was finding these alternative chord progressions and cadences, and when I found an interesting one, it would give rise to a tune.

I first became acquainted with your playing and writing in the early 1970s through the Road album by the Paul Winter Consort. Did you write all of the group's material?

I think that was my first recording. It was a live album. I didn't exactly jump into the music business; I was already 30 years old when we recorded that. I only worked with Paul for about one year and wrote a lot of his repertoire during that time. Before I joined, the group didn't have too many original pieces; they were playing a potpourri of different arrangements of things. I figured that with the group's unusual instrumentation [acoustic bass, guitar, soprano saxophone, oboe, cello, and percussion], they should have original pieces. I started cranking out tunes like "Icarus."

That tune had a life of its own.

It still does. Paul Winter recorded it four or five times, Oregon recorded it, I did it on a solo album where I overdubbed it as a duet between guitar and piano. I also recorded it in 1974 with [jazz vibraphone player] Gary Burton on a record called Matchbook. It is also on the Oregon in Moscow record. I sort of beat it to death. To me, the original version on Road is still the best.

It is a little unusual that you play both classical guitar and 12-string. How did you become interested in the 12-string?

Paul Winter introduced me to it. He had a 12-string and wanted me to play it on a tune we were doing. It is a unique-sounding instrument, and I found that it fit well with Collin's sitar and tablas.

The 12-string has to be rough on your fingernails.

I have these really strong nails. I was born with these things that look like toenails. Someone told me I must have a horse in my genetic makeup-I have hooves instead of fingernails. Even so, I can't play the 12-string too much because it will wear my nails down.

On Anthem, you use an alternate tuning for the short 12-string pieces called " Three Comments." Is that the same tuning you have used on earlier recordings?

No, I never used it before. I started cranking on the strings until I found something interesting, then I improvised those pieces. I don't think I could find that tuning again--I don't write the tunings down. I usually tune the inside strings so that they are not in octaves or unisons. I leave the top E strings in unison and the ow E strings in an octave, but the eight inside strings are all different pitches.

What approach do you take to writing music?

I usually write the melodies and the harmonies at the same time. I have always been interested in taking simple melodies and changing their atmosphere with the harmony. After listening to all of kinds of ethnic music and pieces in odd meters, I started blending harmonies, odd meters, unusual phrase lengths. If a phrase feels like it wants to go longer or shorter-even by one beat-I'll let it. The song "Green and Gold" [from the 1997 solo CD Ana] has so many meter changes that you wouldn't believe it. It was done that way to control the phrasing from getting too tricky. I don't set out to write an odd-meter piece. The melody starts to take shape and then it will start finding its way into a meter.

There are some chords in your music that are hard to classify. I'm thinking of the opening to the solo "Haunted" from Anthem, where you play an open A in the bass and then an F-minor triad above it.

That is where chord symbols break down. The voicings can be so critical to a piece that I don't want to write a symbol down that someone will misread or misinterpret. There can be a drastic difference between what Herbie Hancock would play for a Cmaj7 chord and what a folk musician would play. To ensure that I get the sound I want, I write out the voicing. Some of the chords give birth to eight-note scales. I will write a piece and then look at it later and realize that it might have unusual scales or a combination of modes.

You cover a lot of stylistic territory on Anthem. Is there a theme that helped it develop?

The title Anthem is really appropriate for that CD. Almost every selection is dedicated to a person or the memory of a person. The album had a concept without me realizing it until later. Playing the Mingus song ["Goodbye, Pork-Pie Hat"] is my tribute to him. It is a tribute within a tribute, as he wrote it for [saxophonist] Lester Young.

Is your tune "Very Late," then, a tribute to Bill Evans and his song "Very Early"?

Yes. It is a waltz like "Very Early" and has a very similar atmosphere.

You found many ways to make a solo guitar very interesting by varying the textures. Tell me about those single-line melodies in "Four Comets."

I have been steeped in the harmonic possibilities of the guitar, but it sounds so beautiful just playing melodies. Those are strictly melodic pieces that exploit the beauty of the instrument and give a little relief from the density of the other pieces.

What made you choose to use a capo on "The Lutemaker"?

That was a fluke. My wife bought some John Dowland music, and the way the guitar parts were written, you have to capo up to the third fret to be in the key where the singer's part is written. So I bought a capo and found the guitar sounded so good with it that I got inspired to write that tune. It's dedicated to a guy in Palermo who is a violin and lute maker.

What types of concerts are you playing these days?

In addition to playing with Oregon, I am doing a lot of solo concerts and work in a trio with an Italian singer named Maria Pia DeVito and an English piano player named John Taylor. The trio has one album out. I still occasionally do some duo concerts with bassist Gary Peacock. We have two records out: Oracle and A Closer View.

How much do you perform each year?

I have plenty of opportunities to play, but I try not to perform too much to avoid overexposure and because it wears me down. I do at least one tour each year with Oregon, a tour with a duo or the trio, and at least two solo tours. Since I live in Europe, I can do single concerts here and there without too much trouble. For instance, I had a concert booked in Lisbon last April, and I just went there for the concert and then right back to Palermo, Italy, where I live.

Do you write out your solo guitar pieces?

Only to publish them. On pieces that have some improvisation, I will generally compose a development section where the improvisation was.

Is much of your music available in sheet music form?

There is one guitar suite that is published, and I had a method book that I felt was very good, but it is no longer available. "Juggler's Etude" was published, and I wrote a long section that is like a solo that I might have played, except it is a little more refined. I am planning to redo my method book and publish my music with GSP [Guitar Solo Productions in San Francisco, www.gsp-guitar.com]. That will be a nice home for my guitar music. It will be in volumes of about 60 pages. I have enough for several volumes.

Just how large is your catalog of works?

I have a few hundred tunes, a couple of symphonies, orchestral music with solo guitar, and other music that Oregon plays with orchestra. We will be playing a lot more with orchestra as a result of the attention the Oregon in Moscow CD has received.

Do you get calls to write film scores?

I have done things like documentaries for the forest service in America and one feature-length film in Rome. The director of that one was great. He was very musical and wanted music that represented each character, not a lot of atmospheric music. I also wrote some music for the play The Tempest for a Shakespeare festival in Ashland, Oregon.

With so many opportunities to compose for various ensembles and orchestra, what draws you back so often to the sound of the solo classical guitar?

The classical guitar is very expressive. Its sound is very complex and very subtle. It can be played in a boring way with little variation, but if you have classical training, you can include all the variations of tone color, attack, and phrasing. It was a real advantage for me to study these things with a great classical teacher. When I am playing, I feel like a listener, just like someone in the audience. I am still fascinated with the sounds that come out of the instrument.