Ralph Towner, whose first instrument was piano, didn’t start learning classical guitar until he was 22.
Fat Foot
A selection from Towner’s new album, At First Light.
“I’m definitely curious, but less and less so, the older I get,” he comments. “But I’m still involved in this process of writing, and finding that one little germ that makes the start of a composition.
“I’ve been more obsessive than I’ve been curious,” he continues. “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.”
It’s no surprise that Towner—who’s amassed a staggering discography since his earliest days with the Paul Winter Consort, and his 1970 co-founding of the still-active jazz-and-world-music group Oregon, and through a busy, parallel career as a solo artist—has cultivated a strong personal understanding of the composing process. And his new release, At First Light, is the latest product of what the now 83-year-old has been honing on the guitar for just over 60 years. Of the album, he says, “I really felt like I could make another statement as a soloist, so there’s just one classical guitar on it.”
“I wouldn’t define that as curiosity. Because you’re being curious about something that doesn’t exist.”
If you’ve played enough classical or jazz fingerstyle guitar, something about listening to solo pieces of that nature—at least, when performed at Towner’s level—can provoke more carefully realized mental images of the craft itself. When listening to At First Light, I could almost picture the acrobatic formation of various chord and interval shapes by Towner’s weathered-yet-steady hands.
With over 100 album credits to his name as either a bandleader, sideman, or solo artist, Ralph Towner felt inspired to make another statement as a solo guitarist on At First Light.
The album opens with an original, “Flow,” which begins with a spacious, impressionistic passage that soon transforms into a more fiendish motif which reveals itself just twice throughout the piece. Towner’s arrangements of the 1960 standard, Jule Styne’s “Make Someone Happy,” the Irish traditional “Danny Boy,” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Little Old Lady”—which, as he comments, was famously covered by comedian and musician Jimmy Durante—mostly wink at their inspirations, intermittently sneaking their respective themes into explorative, pleasantly wandering harmonies. Meanwhile, Towner’s original voice persists on “Ubi Sunt,” which unravels with a seemingly cautious sense of searching; “Fat Foot,” which speaks with the assertive cadence of a downtown urbanite; and the aptly named closing track, “Empty Stage,” which conveys a somehow friendly, harmless angst.
At First Light was recorded in a large, empty auditorium in Lugano, Switzerland, and produced by Manfred Eicher, who Towner’s been working with since the early ’70s. Towner, who currently plays an Australia-made Jim Redgate classical guitar with a cedar top, dislikes pickups in acoustic guitars, eschewing them for external microphones. “Microphones more accurately reproduce the actual sustain of the strings, and pickups, though greatly improved with better technology, tend to make an artificial increase in volume and sustain that make up the very refined nuances that are controlled on the nylon-string classical guitar,” he shares. The songs were recorded with Schoeps microphones, and their sequence on the track list is that in which Towner performed them. “I can hear my hands getting warmer, and my tone getting stronger as the recording goes on. Maybe only I would know this,” Towner reflects.
But long before At First Light, and before he accumulated the over-100 other recording credits he has to his name today, Towner grew up in “semi-poverty”—as he puts it—in Chehalis, Washington, with two older brothers who served in World War II and a mother who taught piano. “I would hear these influent piano lessons from the back room from the time I was very young,” he shares. She taught him piano before he later began learning trumpet around the age of 6, and the two would play duets together—with her on the former instrument and him on the latter.
“On the trumpet, you learn about how to control your breath and what breath is,” Towner elaborates. “The thing that really is important on the more machine-like guitar or piano is to develop and connect it with breath and delivery. Yet, you have to honor what each instrument does, or what it’s capable of doing. To make a piano sing requires a different kind of thing.”
Ralph Towner's Gear
Although his focus has been guitar for the past several decades, Towner is also a trained pianist, and learned how to play the trumpet as a child.
Photo by Paolo Soriani
Guitars
- Jeffrey Elliot spruce-top classical guitars
- Cyndy Burton spruce-top classical guitars
- Jim Redgate cedar-top classical guitar
- Two 1974 12-string custom Guilds
Strings
- D’Addario EJ45 Pro-Arte Normal Tension
He went on to study piano at the University of Oregon, where he says he could barely make ends meet, and worked in a beet-and-bean cannery during the summer. Then, at 22, he heard the classical guitar for the first time when he saw a student performing Bach on the instrument. That’s when he dropped everything and moved to Vienna to study at the city’s Academy of Music, where he devotedly shifted his musical education to the nylon-string, and focused on learning Renaissance, Elizabethan, and lute music.
“Being able to play bebop was almost like … a badge that would get you in the door.”
When Towner moved to New York City after his graduation in the late ’60s, it was on the piano that he first made a living, and he found that the way for him to do that at that time was by playing jazz. But, “We didn’t have jazz schools back then,” he shares. “It helped to have a friend who was a bass player; that really made a big difference in how I learned and worked on the piano, enough to actually play gigs on it.
“One thing that was important when I moved to New York was to be able to play a passable version of bebop,” Towner continues. “Being able to play bebop was almost like … a badge that would get you in the door.” As one of the world’s biggest “small” towns, the city was fertile in the sense of how quickly that entry led to important connections. “I remember going over to Wayne Shorter’s apartment and we played each other’s music on cassettes or on his piano,” he shares, “and I spent a whole afternoon with him. This was about two years before Weather Report.”
When he lived in New York City following his graduation from the Vienna Academy of Music, Towner found that knowing how to play bebop was what gave him entry into successful musical circles.
Photo by Caterina di Perri
The guitarist’s first big break came when he joined the Paul Winter Consort not long after his New York move. (Only a handful of years later, during their 1971 mission, the Apollo 15 crew named two lunar craters after two of Towner’s early compositions for the group, “Icarus” and “Ghost Bead.”) Shortly after joining the Consort, he was featured on Weather Report’s I Sing the Body Electric, recording the intro to “The Moors” on a 12-string guitar; released a debut album with Oregon, Music of Another Present Era; and a year later, debuted as a solo artist with Trios / Solos (beginning a now 50-year relationship with the ECM label). In the five decades since, Towner has collaborated with artists such as Gary Peacock, Vince Mendoza, Jack DeJohnette, and Bill Bruford, and also distinguished himself with his penchant for playing improvised music on the 12-string guitar, while growing his stature as a nylon-string guitarist.
Today, as a composer, Towner remains fascinated by the creative process. “When you find what’s really an idea that seems to speak, it’s a logic of music,” he shares. “You sort of telescope this first event, and everything that follows is related to the initial idea. It unravels like a story, because you sense when something’s right for where you’re going with it as you go. You wouldn’t write a lyric that would change midstream. So, it’s got a big relation to the spoken word and literary content. There’s a logic to the music that’s also kind of an emotional logic too.”
“That’s an invitation to have a musical accident…. Nothing gets hurt, but maybe your ego.”
In comparing musical compositions to literary content, Towner draws a bit of a contrast to what one might rightfully expect of his influences, given his extensive catalog of instrumental music. He elaborates, “I didn’t even bother to listen to the Beatles at first, for about two, three, four years … and then was really stunned with this kind of doggerel,” he says, continuing, “I used to be very critical of Bob Dylan, always making fun of the way he sang. But then I wised up and started reading the lyrics. I started hearing his delivery when he sang … which is only his, truly his, but was very musical.
Getting back into performing live after the pandemic was challenging for Towner, who said that during his first few return performances, he would get easily distracted.
“Then I discovered pretty recently, maybe 10 years ago,” he shares, “[My wife and I,] we’re in the car and she said ‘Oh, listen to this.’ And she’s quite a fan of English rock, art rock. And I finally heard…. Oh, god, help,” he says, struggling to place the name. “Uh, Led Zeppelin.”
Something else new to Towner is the concept of “imposter syndrome”—a type of self-doubt even Eric Johnson has alluded to experiencing—and he has trouble finding honest examples of when or if he’s ever identified with it. His confidence was indeed shaken, however, by the pandemic, at least in terms of giving live performances. “The first concerts I did [when the world returned to performing] were like, my god, I don’t even know how or where to put my mind, or what I’m playing. I’m thinking like, ‘Gee, did I leave the gas on at home?’ That’s an invitation to have a musical accident. Like a car accident, except it’s music. Nothing gets hurt, but maybe your ego.
Ralph Towner - If(Live in Korea) Pro Shot
Ralph Towner illustrates his impressive dexterity and singular touch on the classical guitar in a live performance of his song “If.”
“I still haven’t had that many concerts, but I think in the last couple, I’ve found out how to begin in that space where you’re kind of hovering above, hearing the music that’s actually coming out of your instrument, but you’re also able to hear it in a distant way, almost as if you’re part of the audience. There’s a little place you suspend yourself in when you’re a performer.”
And while it’s not the first time an artist has described inducing that pseudo-out-of-body experience in order to better express themselves in their music, Towner’s sage perspective proves its worth in the inimitable quality of his playing, whether it’s live or recorded. Looking back on what most would describe as an overwhelmingly full career, he says, “It was like a piece of music in its way, whether it was good or bad. So, when I’m fiddling around wondering what I would have done, I didn’t do anything that I regret at this point.”
Jose González's Cordoba Rodriguez model is based on a 1970s instrument made by the famed Rodriguez family of luthiers from Andalusia's city of Córdoba. It's large, but lightweight, with five rather than the more typical seven braces.
"I wish I was faster, but I am slow," he says. "I feel like I'm doing a style of music that isn't trend-sensitive, so I think I'm allowed to take my time. Even if I wanted to push the pace, that would be a very unnatural rhythm."
José González - Line of Fire (Lyric Video)
Local Valley is anything but an interruption of González's natural rhythm. The collection of astral, quietly textural compositions for solo fingerpicked nylon-string guitar and voice evokes an ephemeral sense of solitude, creating its own realm in which listeners can, like González, distance themselves from external pressures. It's an extension of the same reality González designs for himself.
That's not to say that he hasn't had a full, successful career. His music has been placed in TV shows, including The O.C., One Tree Hill, Bones, House, and Friday Night Lights, and in 2011 he went on a tour with the Göteborg String Theory that spotlighted 11 arrangements of González's songs for orchestra. In 2013, he worked with Ben Stiller on the soundtrack of Stiller's remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which features González's solo work along with music from Junip.
"The existential lyrics are more acute now than they used to be, in a good way, because I'm comfortable with the finite nature of reality."
When discussing Local Valley, González reflects frequently on how he's changed as a musician over the years, both in terms of his approach to music and in his life philosophy. Out of everything, growth seems to be his priority. The album was wrapped in March 2020, and its release was put on hiatus for what has now been a year-and-a-half, due to the pandemic. But like the rest of González's work, it has a timeless quality that no doubt stems from that progressive mindset.
Existential Stead
The process of making Local Valley goes all the way back to 2017, when its songs were seeds, in the form of early demos. The following year, González got a residency at an artists' retreat in Grez-sur-Loing, France, where he decided he was going to begin more seriously writing and recording. There, he composed almost half of the album.
TIDBIT: Like most of his solo albums, this year's Local Valley was recorded by González in his preferred setting—at home. That approach allows him to work at his own pace.
"I had an ambition to go back to my first album and do short songs that were pretty melodic and guitar-oriented. Once I had those songs, I allowed myself to experiment a bit, put the producer's hat on, and not so much be the one who wants to impress people with just this one guitar." He decided to use a looper for some of the tracks, and on the songs "Tjomme," "Lilla G," and "Swing," he used a drum machine—which he says he's always wanted to do. Using the two devices also allows him to create more layers that he can effectively recreate alone when playing live.
During this timeframe, González and his partner, Swedish designer Hannele Fernström, purchased a summer house in Hakefjorden, an hour outside of his home city of Gothenburg, Sweden, where González was then able to record in a quieter environment. (All but his second album were home-recorded.) Onsongs such as "Visions" and "Lasso In," you can hear his field recordings of local birdsong.
Photo by Jim Bennett
The songwriter's guitars of choice are an Esteve 9 C/B and a Córdoba Rodriguez. The former is equipped with a Fishman Prefix Pro Blend pickup. Both guitars feature something else that's crucial to González's recording preferences: very old strings. "I try to vary how old they are for the different songs to get different sustain," he says. "There's something about the lack of treble that I like." A couple of González's other recording tricks include using a wooden percussion stomp box run through an octave pedal, and using a de-esser on the guitar—a favorite technique that takes away the "metallic-sounding frequencies. I'm allergic to 2 kilohertz," he says.
For the first time, González wrote lyrics in Swedish and Spanish—nearly half of the songs on the album are written in both of what he calls his native tongues. The use of the latter was influenced by his daughter Laura, who was born in 2017. When Laura was a toddler, he spoke to her in Spanish, which helped to keep the language alive in his mind while he was writing the album.
José González's Gear
José González plays live at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. in 2015. González uses Fishman pickups in his nylon-strings and places duct tape over the soundholes to help control guitar tones when playing in large rooms.
Photo by Matt Condon
Guitars
- Esteve 9C/B with Fishman Prefix Pro Blend pickup
- Córdoba Rodriguez
Amp
- Schertler Jam (wood)
Effects
- Boss OC-3 Super Octave
Strings
- D'Addario Pro-Arté Silverplated Wound, Nylon Core EJ46 sets
No matter the language, González's lyrics consistently match the nature of his music in their poetry and philosophical style. That's something that happens to have been influenced by Laura's birth as well. "Becoming a father and having parents that are getting older puts me in the middle of life position where I realize that I'm older than what my father or mother were when they had me," González expresses. "I think more about death than usual—not because I have to, but it just comes with the territory. The existential lyrics are more acute now than they used to be, in a good way, because I'm comfortable with the finite nature of reality."
Varied Voices
Before he got into guitar, González played the recorder and explored a Casio synth as a child. Then, around the age of 13 or 14, he and his friends discovered their passion for music. He began playing bass in a hardcore punk band called Back Against the Wall, and, at the same time, discovered his affinity for the nylon-string guitar. "I always felt like it sounded better to my ears than steel-string or electric guitar," he says. His dad, who used to sing in an Argentinian folk band, would ask González to learn songs by the Beatles and bossa nova artists like João Gilberto to accompany him.
By the time he began to record his debut, he was committed to the instrument. "I felt like everyone else was playing steel-string guitars and they were really into Americana, and I had my Latin-American roots," he says. "Also, the '60s, '70s folk singers from Sweden … all of them had Spanish guitars and there was something nostalgic for me with that sound—the lack of treble and sort of earthy sound."
"I write the guitar slightly above my skill level. I need my time to rehearse quite a lot."
The mindful, sedate colors of González's music are not so unlike those of English singer/songwriter Nick Drake—an artist González has often been compared to. González actually hadn't heard of the songwriter before his first album, up until one of the last songs he wrote for it—"Stay in the Shade"—which he says is essentially a "Nick Drake rip-off." His preference for very old strings is another thing he's borrowed from Drake.
Otherwise, González's influences tend to fall mostly outside of the realm of Western music, stretching globally to include the leader of the Nueva Trova movement, Cuban guitarist Silvio Rodríguez; the Argentinian singer Mercedes Sosa; Brazilian composers Caetano Veloso and João Gilberto; and jazz singer Monica Zetterlund and jazz pianist Jan Johansson, both Swedes. On Local Valley, says González, you can also hear the influence of West African guitarist Ali Farka Touré, the Tuareg band Tinariwen, and Tuareg singer/songwriter Bombino. "Valle Local" and "Head On," from the album, happen to be inspired by a jam session with Bombino, says González. He adds to the list Ghanian high-life, dance-oriented music from Congo, Afrobeat from Nigeria, and raga Bhoopali.
González's recording strategy included making field recordings of the birds around his home, and those appear on several of Local Valley's tracks, including "Visions" and "Lasso In."
Then—and we're still talking about influences—there's economics. "From the second album and on, I started to let myself be inspired by books and not only write about internal feelings, but more about an extroverted view on the world," he elaborates. "I try to push myself into not falling into cliches in terms of ideologies, but really try to understand difficult subjects, including economics. I've been reading [books by economists] Joseph Stiglitz, Mariana Mazzucato, and Angus Deaton." The song "Head On" mentions rent seekers and value extractors, concepts that González says have negative connotations on both the right and left. He says it was his ambition to write a song that was angry without being irritating to listeners of either political leaning.
Aural Analysis
González is not what you'd call a prolific songwriter, and that's something he's perfectly comfortable with. He likes to take his time, to the point where, when working on The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, his gradual approach caused Stiller to adapt from his original idea of having González write the entire soundtrack to instead inviting in another composer, Teddy Shapiro, to complete the score. (González is featured six times on the soundtrack: four times as a solo performer and twice with Junip.)
Particularly with his solo music, González says, "I write the guitar slightly above my skill level. I need my time to rehearse quite a lot, and that's one of the main reasons why I'm slow. I set the bar a bit higher than my skills." He crafts his guitar parts somewhat analytically—something he relates to his experience of having pursued a PhD in biochemistry before he devoted himself to his music. "I do a lot of trial and error before I have my final product."
González performs on the Bigfoot Stage at the 2015 Sasquatch! Festival in George, Washington. He was accompanied by a percussionist for a set mostly of songs from his first solo album.
Photo by Debi Del Grande
"I have my different tunings and that allows me to not think in terms in chords, but to think in bass lines and arpeggios," he continues. "Nick Drake has been a big inspiration in terms of tuning and using the thumb to do the bass, and having arpeggios to do the body of the song. Then I always think about the highest note as an extra melody. That's how I try to make the song as dense as possible with only one guitar." González uses a variety of alternate tunings. On "El Invento," the tuning is in drop D. On "Visions," it's D–A–D–A–B–E. Other tunings on the album include E–A–D–A–B–E and B–A–D–A–B–E. He also has a proclivity to avoid the third—"either major or minor." Although, "Nowadays, I'm more okay with major chords—but I'm still avoiding minor."
Over the years, González has simplified his songwriting process. He says he used to follow a set of rules, inspired by Danish film directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who set limits and edicts for how they could make films with their director-centric "Dogme 95 Manifesto," created in 1995. Two of González's primary rules are not writing verse-chorus-type songs, in favor of more linear writing, and avoiding using "me" or "I" in the lyrics.
But if the gentle, organic progression of his career says anything about González, it's that he's eased up quite a bit on himself since he started out. "Since then, I've been okay to not have any rules," he says. "Nowadays, I'm just happy to make things up."
José González at Michelberger Hotel - Jim Beam Welcome Session #3
José González is well in form as he performs "Valle Local" from his new album, showcasing his expert fingerpicking on nylon-string guitar while accompanying his softly sung vocal.
