美国国家公共电台 NPR Ralph Towner: An Old Hand With A 'Foolish Heart' (And An Unmatched Style)

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Ralph Towner made a name for himself nearly 50 years ago as a member of the Paul Winter Consort 1. Towner plays the guitar. He composed, perhaps, the Consort's best-known tune 2.

(SOUNDBITE OF PAUL WINTER CONSORT SONG "ICARUS")

KELLY: "Icarus" was so well liked, the Apollo 15 astronauts took it to the moon. Today Ralph Towner is in his late 70s, still going strong. Here's NPR's Tom Cole on Towner's latest solo record and a group recording 3 on the way.

TOM COLE, BYLINE 4: Ralph Towner is best known today as an acoustic 5 guitarist, but he grew up a piano prodigy 6 in a small town in western Washington state.

RALPH TOWNER: Nobody knew what to do with me. Had I lived in the East Coast, I think I might have been immediately sent to a music school very early. But as it was, I had a sort of simplistic childhood kind of Norman Rockwell style.

COLE: Bucolic 7 with a soundtrack. His father played trumpet 8, and his mother was a piano teacher.

TOWNER: I would go to this old piano that we had. In the beginning, I used to just hold down the pedal and hit something and let it ring. And I remember just being enthralled 9 with hearing this chord sustain and then slowly disappear.

GARY PEACOCK: He already came into this life with a level of talent that many people don't have.

COLE: Gary Peacock knows from prodigies 10. He's Keith Jarrett's bass 11 player, a composer in his own right and a longtime collaborator 12 of Towner's. He says the latter has a talent few possess.

PEACOCK: Ralph has incredible ears. I remember on a tour one time, I walked into his dressing 13 room just to see if everything's OK and blah, blah, blah. And he's playing three notes on his guitar over and over again. And then maybe adding something over and over and over. It's like anybody walking by would think, what is he doing? What he's doing is listening - listening to what is there and now what comes next.

(SOUNDBITE OF GARY PEACOCK AND RALPH TOWNER SONG, "TRAMONTO")

COLE: Ralph Towner began playing piano when he was three. He took up trumpet two years later, yet he wound up at the University of Washington studying art before switching to music composition. It was there that he first heard a record by a musician who had become one of his biggest influences - pianist Bill Evans and his legendary 14 trio.

(SOUNDBITE OF BILL EVANS SONG, "MY FOOLISH HEART")

TOWNER: I always wanted to record "My Foolish Heart." It's one of the first tunes 15 I'd heard that combination of Evans, Lafaro and Paul Motion play. So that tune had a lot of meaning for me and was very important for me at least starting out as a jazz musician.

COLE: Towner finally recorded it for his latest album.

(SOUNDBITE OF RALPH TOWNER SONG, "MY FOOLISH HEART")

COLE: It was also in college that Towner first heard a classical guitar.

TOWNER: I never was really attracted to the guitar until I heard a classical guitar. For me, it's like a small piano and what you can do with it in terms of moving secondary voices around in your music. And you could play all of these notes with all the fingers of your right hand.

COLE: Towners developed an instantly recognizable style, one that seems to involve playing all of those notes with all ten fingers of both hands, playing melody, harmony and rhythm almost simultaneously 16.

(SOUNDBITE OF RALPH TOWNER SONG, "DOLOMITI DANCE")

PAUL MCCANDLESS: You hear the bass. You hear the chords. You hear the melody. And the illusion is created that there's a whole ensemble 17 playing - a whole world that he creates just with a guitar.

COLE: Woodwind player Paul McCandless has been collaborating 18 with Towner for nearly half a century - first, in the Paul Winter Consort and then in the group that split off from the Consort, Oregon.

(SOUNDBITE OF OREGON SONG, "CANYON 19 SONG")

COLE: Ralph Towner has been Oregon's primary composer since the beginning, and the classically trained McCandless says there's a reason.

MCCANDLESS: These pieces that Ralph created - I always say that if you changed one note, it wouldn't be as good, in some ways, the way Mozart and his music are irreducible. And I think that Ralph's gift for melody and singable (ph) melodies really transport the listener to another world.

(SOUNDBITE OF RALPH TOWNER SONG, "CLARION 20 CALL")

TOWNER: Each piece is like a little story. It's like a little world into itself. And once you start writing a piece, the first few sounds that you make you can project it into a complete story. You sort of create a little history out of the first few germs of an idea.

COLE: Towner just turned 77. And the history behind his latest album brings that tune he heard Bill Evans play all those years ago, "My Foolish Heart," up to the present.

TOWNER: There's a little irony 21 in it since I just had a pacemaker put in about two years ago. We had a concert in Germany, and I fell on my face on the first sound check. So I had to go to the hospital. I'd kind of blacked out. Turns out that my heart was beating so slow, and so I called the whole CD "My Foolish Heart." I hope it's over its foolishness.

COLE: So do his fans. Tom Cole, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF RALPH TOWNER SONG, "MY FOOLISH HEART")