Jazz for intellectuals

In 1972, when Oregon first hit the music scene with their debut Vanguard LP Music of Another Present Era, the photos of the band left more than a few jazz fans scratching their heads. Posing with Collin Walcott's tablas, Ralph Towner's classical guitar and Paul McCandless' oboe, there was little in their appearance that immediately said "jazz," other than Glen Moore's upright bass.

While the collection of instruments may have seemed eclectic or even eccentric at the time, nearly four decades later, Oregon's notions of blending an international array of instruments and musical ideas with the tenets of jazz and classical music have proved not only successful but prophetic.

Although the group's name refers to Towner and Moore's home state, the ensemble was a big-city formation launched in the late 1960s on fertile ground that Towner describes as "a wonderful movement in New York City that was to alter the face of music by people improving and advancing their technique using all the traditional means, plus refined things you would find in classical interpretation and performance."

Reflecting on that time and place, Towner adds, "That was an exciting scene, because it really was 'world music' in the sense of all the players streaming into New York." That group included some outstanding Czech musicians: bass players George Mraz and Miroslav Vitouš, and pianist Jan Hammer, whom Towner remembers as "incredible - Jan could play in all these odd [Central and East European] meters."

Towner, who had studied classical music in Vienna earlier in the '60s, had a deep appreciation for the legacy of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók and knew exactly where the European jazz émigrés were coming from with their Carpathian folk rhythms, Baroque and French Impressionist influences. Central to the spread of these impulses was the Austrian-born keyboard player of Roma parentage, Joe Zawinul.

"Harmonically, Joe was always evolving," Towner recalls. "He was doing a lot of the composition in Miles Davis' groups at the time, and is responsible for much of the whole of Davis' In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew era."

Further deepening Oregon's Eastern reach was the living sitar master Ravi Shankar, who taught the late Walcott the fine points of playing sitar. And, even before the formation of Oregon, Towner had been turning the classical guitar into a jazz axe, building on the sophisticated chord changes of Brazilian artists like Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao Gilberto, and working with artists like Airto and Astrud Gilberto.

Oregon's reaction to the rapidly changing jazz landscape was and remains a compositional approach. Towner describes it as "taking advantage of the finesse each player had with their classical experience, and also still pursuing jazz improvisation and the evolution of that, including trying to advance the harmony beyond the 2-5 system of bebop or jazz standards." Such techniques can be heard to good effect on Oregon's most recent recordings, with the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra on 2000's Oregon in Moscow (on the Intuition label) and on the 2007 release 1000 Kilometers (on Camjazz). While Oregon in Moscow offers evocative orchestral rereads of some of the band's previous work, cuts like Towner's Free-Form Piece for Orchestra and Improvisors display the band's ongoing ability for effective experimentation.

After the tragic loss of percussionist Collin Walcott in a fatal road accident in 1984, it wasn't until the late '90s that the group finally settled a replacement, trap maestro Mark Walker. Having worked with Elvin Jones, Oregon knows how to absorb a strong drummer, and Walker brings both rhythmic strength and compositional skills to the band's new studio and stage performances.

As to how all these forces will come into play in Prague, Towner promises a set ranging from the group's earliest works to debuts of new pieces drawn from their upcoming CD, currently in production. While Oregon's innovative world-class musicianship makes any appearance a must-see, concertgoers can also expect an element of surprise.

"Some pieces are almost traditional jazz in the way our improvisation works," Towner says. "Other pieces are on the extreme of the improvisation scale, where we completely compose on the spot. This sort of spontaneous composition used to be called 'free music,' but that's not really appropriate, because nothing's free anymore. But we sometimes start from scratch, with four people composing, and it can range from completely atonal to breaking into a polka. Anything can happen - and does."

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at
features@praguepost.com