Oregon represented a fundamental stage along the path that led from acoustic jazz to the stateless sonorities of new age. Among the musicians who, beginning in the 1970s, reevaluated form over content and progressively demolished every geographical and temporal barrier, Oregon were among the earliest and most influential.

Guitarist Ralph Towner and bassist Glen Moore (both born in 1940) met in 1960 at the University of Oregon, where they formed a trio modeled on Bill Evans's. In 1968 they moved to New York, and in 1969 they did not let the opportunity to accompany singer Tim Hardin at the Woodstock festival pass them by. They had already played with Paul Winter's touring Consort, and in January of the following year they decided to join it permanently.

It was the period when Paul Winter was developing his mystical world music, with a musical style that borrowed practices and values from both jazz and classical music. In addition to the Oregon duo, the Consort thus featured percussionist Collin Walcott, who testified to the influence of African folk music, and Paul McCandless, who played the oboe and represented the ensemble's classical soul.

From Winter, those young musicians learned the secrets of a sound poised between musical worlds so different from one another: Third World and West, improvisation and composition, jazz and classical music. Towner also learned to play the twelve-string guitar and composed the Consort's theme, Icarus. All of them developed an extremely personal style on their respective instruments.

When Towner, Moore, Walcott, and McCandless founded Oregon, they intended nothing more than to continue along their teacher's path. Their music, too, was to fuse improvisation and composition, jazz and classical music, and draw inspiration from Asian and African traditions. The main attraction was the instrumentation, unique in bringing together the oboe of classical music and Indian percussion, folk guitar and jazz double bass.

The music announced by their first album, programmatically titled Music Of Another Present Era, is delicately impressionistic and visionary: the breath of nature, the spirit of life, and the movement of the universe flow through it. With their drizzle of velvety, crystalline chords, the instruments paint tender watercolors suspended in nothingness. It is an album of whispers, of dense, sotto voce dialogues, of flows of simple emotions.

Surreal duets of bass and mridangam (Spring Is Really Coming) or guitar and piano (Land Of Heart's Desire) evoke a sort of metaphysical sketch-making. From the gloomy, listless, confused murmur of North Star to the festive Brazilian fanfare of Sail, from the hypnotic raga of Opening to the dissonant chatter of Baku The Dream Eater, from the poignant air of The Swan to the mannered jazz-rock of Touchstone, the album traces a complex kaleidoscope of sonic places, developing a humbly acoustic language that combines a luxuriant poetic vein with elaborate and sophisticated narrative structures.

That refined exploration within sound—of timbres and cadences, harmonies and contrasts—is sublimated on the subsequent album, Distant Hills. Towner is its absolute master. In addition to further smoothing out the sound, Towner lengthens the compositions, and consequently complicates their structure. Both intimate and anonymous, both fresh and fragile, both elegant and ambiguous, both delicate and repetitive, both lyrical and listless, Oregon's music indulges in its own contradictions, never attempting a true synthesis of its various fundamental components. And it is precisely in these contradictions that it finds its value.
The highly romantic overture of Aurora (destined to remain one of their most famous themes), the flamenco raga of Dark Spirit, the classical-style serenade of Distant Hills, the vibrant sarabande of Canyon Song, and the tender double-bass-and-guitar duet of Song For A Friend are typical of the unreal, twilight, existential mood that pervades the group's exotic chamber jazz.

Calligraphic to the point of paradox, Winter Light mixes and confuses the sources of inspiration of their sound even further, while at the same time accentuating its sense of mystery. The tempos expand still further, the notes are even more sparingly dispensed, and the instrumentation increasingly studied. The album is above all more songful (the enveloping oboe melody in Fond Librč, the insistent piano refrain of Rainmaker) and more rhythmically driven (Poesia, Marguerite). The key tracks, Tide Pool and Ghost Beads, are again by Towner, and they are also the ones in which the debts to the Renaissance and Baroque are most evident (especially in the way Towner's guitar handles counterpoint and rhythm). Everything unfolds under the banner of formal perfection: every slightest musical gesture is calculated in function of an overall effect of suggestion and effect. With these albums, Oregon's sound definitively establishes itself as a classic of its era and sets a precedent against which dozens of other acoustic ensembles are measured.

The achievement of maturity is celebrated by In Concert (April 1975), more lively and colorful than their studio albums. Together (January 1976) with Elvin Jones, on the other hand, is stifled by the guest's strong personality. Even Friends, the album that returns to their traditional sound, fails to replicate the magical atmospheres of their early work: it is a polished ballad like Grazing Dreams, rather than the long (and rambling) Interstate, that saves the album.

If Oregon had established themselves as a “serious” cross between Third Ear Band and Weather Report, they have now settled into the cold formalism of classical music, without possessing its compositional stature. Violin, with violinist Zbigniew Seifert and a lengthy collective improvisation (the title track), offers no alternative to a musical path that is proving increasingly sterile (the most intriguing track is perhaps Raven's Wood, which is also the least pretentious).

Thus, appearing at yearly intervals, came the albums Out Of The Woods, one of their lyrical peaks, Roots In The Sky, and Moon And Mind. The quartet is now recognized as a precursor of a kind of aestheticized jazz intended for transcendental meditation. Their compositional and arranging abilities are certainly at their peak: even the most insipid pieces are ennobled by sophisticated scores and splendid performances. And Oregon's exotic impressionism still finds ways to capitalize on the fascination of the exotic (Yellow Bell from Out Of The Woods, Vessel from Roots, McCandless's title track, and The Elk from Moon).

Meanwhile, all the members of the quartet have become famous enough to afford solo adventures. The most successful is Towner, who has been recording under his own name since as early as 1973.

Three years pass before Oregon, the group's first album for ECM, is released, partly because of the difficulties the group encountered in finding a contract, partly because of Walcott's family problems, and partly because of Towner's solo success.

Oregon had been pioneers of the refined jazz championed by ECM. The marriage is celebrated under the banner of several conceptual innovations. As in Towner's solo work, the sound is modernized through the use of the synthesizer; but, above all, much of the album's music is improvised, following the principles of the contemporary avant-garde.
Towner and his companions have therefore abandoned the “Renaissance” style—predominantly melodic and rather geometric, and thus conducive to easy communication with the listener—in favor of a more austere form of chamber music. Standing above all are the epic fanfare of Rapids and, above all, the deeply moving adagio of Arianna. Even more demanding, though less emotionally compelling, are the scores of There Was No Moon That Night and Impending Bloom.
Even more mature results are achieved in Crossing, especially in Queen Of Sydney (a long stream of sound without beginning or end, immersed in one of their most magical atmospheres), Amaryllis (the quintessence of McCandless's lyrical classicism), and Glide (a swinging piece that lays bare Towner's jazz soul). Introspective, meticulous, lyrical, hermetic, Oregon's new sound does not renounce the past but builds a deeper poetics upon it. The direction is Towner's increasingly electronic one, as he firmly leads the troupe.

In 1984, however, Collin Walcott died in a car accident and was replaced by the Indian musician Trilok Gurtu, a tabla player who had accompanied Lou Reed in the Everyman Band before immersing himself in the new jazz scene (Don Cherry, Barre Phillips, Paul Bley). Thus, for the first time in fourteen years, the Oregon lineup changed.

Ecotopia, while confirming the direction taken by Crossing, adapts their sophisticated jams to the much more jazz-oriented and aggressive style of the new percussionist. On 45th Parallel, Towner's synthesizer dominates the sonorities of ballads such as Pageant, King Font, Hand In Hand. For the first time, a singer also appears: Nancy King. Always Never And Forever, released three years after its predecessor, is a more acoustic effort (Towner largely abandons the synthesizer and returns to guitar and piano) and perhaps for this reason is more tenderly sophisticated. Troika means that Gurtu has left McCandless, Towner, and Moore to their incipient senility.

Although Oregon's later albums have not constituted major musical events, the group remains a milestone in the evolution that led music toward a heterogeneous, introspective, and meditative sound. Their techniques of rhythm, arrangement, and composition created a “baroque folk-jazz” that has won hundreds of declared and undeclared disciples.

McCandless, Moore and Ralph Towner reformed Oregon for Beyond Words (Chesky, 1996).

Northwest Passage (october 1996) featured drummers Arto Tuncboyaciyan and Mark Walker.

Glen Moore recorded Nude Bass Ascending (april 1997) with Steve Swallow (electric bass), Carla Bley (Hammond organ), Arto Tuncboyaciyan (percussion and vocals) and oud player Rabih Abou-Khalil.

Oregon In Moskow (january 1999) documents a session with the Moscow Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra conducted by George Garanian.

Jade Muse (2000) is a career retrospective.

A graduate in ethnomusicology from UCLA in Los Angeles and introduced to the sitar by Shankar, Collin Walcott represented the African soul of the Paul Winter Consort.

Cloud Dance, his first solo album, is a much less exciting record than those released by his colleague Towner. Although surrounded by an all-star lineup featuring Abercrombie, Holland, and DeJohnette, Walcott reveals all the limitations of his Indianism. Only the title track manages to entertain without falling into the genre's stereotypes.

The subsequent Grazing Dreams (with Don Cherry, Abercrombie, a Brazilian percussionist, and a Swedish bassist), thanks to a better balance of registers and timbres, achieves much more evocative results. On the first side, the poignant lament of Song Of The Morrow, steeped in existential spleen, pain, and a sense of nature; the exuberant Gold Sun, an airy bebop theme set to the rhythm of an almost Hare Krishna dance; and the experiment of The Swarm, in which the raga becomes a hypnotic, dizzying noise of “bees,” follow one another seamlessly like movements of a single suite. Neither with Oregon nor on his own would Walcott ever again reach these expressive heights.

In the wake of this experience, Walcott went on to form the trio Codona, with Cherry on trumpet and Nana Vasconcelos on percussion. Their ethnic jazz, torn between Cherry's Africanism, Walcott's Indianism, and Vasconcelos's Brazilianism, fails to coagulate into a truly original synthesis. On the first (and best) of the three albums, it is Walcott himself who dominates, author of the tribal Mumakata, the hypnotic raga of New Light, and the sinister Like That Of Sky.

Walcott also distinguished himself as the regular accompanist of avant-garde singer Meredith Monk.

In 1984, Walcott died in a car accident.

Paul McCandless is Oregon's oboist and has embodied its classical soul. Navigator, featuring David Samuels (Spyrogyra) on percussion, Steve Rodby (Pat Metheny) on bass, Ross Traut on guitar, and Jay Clayton (Steve Reich) on vocals, is the album that best represents him.

Glen Moore is Oregon's bassist. May 24, 1976 is a recording of an improvisation with pianist Larry Karush. Moore later also collaborated with David Friesen.

The Oregon guitarist began his solo career without straying too far from the sound that had made him famous: the watercolors of the first collection released under his own name still owe much to the group's work, especially Brujo.

Diary, on the other hand, is a milestone of introspective and meditative jazz. A classical twelve-string style and a flexible, creative compositional technique underpin a highly personal expressive logic. On the album, Towner alternates among all the instruments: the sunny theme of Icarus steals the show from all the other tracks, but Images, with its sinister Eastern resonances, Dark Spirit, a classical-style sonata for guitar and piano, Mon Enfant, a magical guitar solo, and the driving jazz sarabande of Ogden Road point toward even more adventurous and evocative paths.

With Gary Burton on vibraphone, Towner recorded Matchbook, an album that is a triumph of crystalline, ecstatic, corporeal sonorities, from the exuberant overture of Drifting Petals to the swinging title track (all his own compositions, which are added to the usual Icarus and Aurora). Then, with fellow guitarist John Abercrombie, he recorded Sargasso Sea, a much more evanescent and intangible work, suspended in the partner's fairytale atmospheres. Towner contributes the possessed flamenco of Staircase and the impressionistic watercolor of Parasol.

More questionable is the experience with Solstice, namely the Norwegian Jan Garbarek (saxophones), the German Eberhard Weber (double bass and cello), and the Dane Jon Christensen (percussion), whose albums are strongly marked by Garbarek's personality and narcissistically display a jazz-rock calligraphy pushed to the point of self-sufficient effect-making. The exuberant Oceanus and, above all, the bucolic Nimbus, on the ensemble's first album, as well as the atmospheric Balance Beam, the airy Arion, and especially the dazed Song Of The Shadows on the second, are the most evocative compositions Towner contributes to the group.

Batik, with Eddie Gomez on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums, is perhaps his quintessential “jazz-rock” album, from the lively Waterwheel to the delicate Trellis, culminating in the opus magnum of his career, the title track.

The increasingly pretentious lyricism of Old Friends New Friends, with Kenny Wheeler, alternates melodic ballads with overwhelming jazz pieces featuring a more varied instrumentation. Towering above them all is Beneath An Evening Sky, one of his most famous themes.

The return to simplicity of Solo Concert provides a breath of fresh air: Spirit Lake, Zoetrope, Chelsea Courtyard, and all the other wordless ballads, relying on a style that is conversational and descriptive before being virtuosic, move gracefully and acrobatically into a borderland shared with folk, where figures such as John Fahey and Leo Kottke reside. Towner has never communicated so spontaneously and directly with his audience, and here reaches the romantic apex of his musical adventure.

If in many of these albums Towner seems (too often) to imitate Moors, the celebrated Weather Report piece with which he collaborated, the great novelty of Blue Sun (his third entirely solo album) is instead the synthesizer, which dominates alongside the horns, guitars, and percussion (all played by Towner) with its atmospheric register. The cathartic effect of Solo Concert, an album for guitar alone, can still be felt in the tender melodies of Blue Sun, the fairytale textures of The Prince And The Sage, the driving interweaving lines of Wedding Of The Streams, and the festive dance of Shadow Fountain.

A highly balanced and skillfully arranged album, Blue Sun fully expresses the musician's gifts by harmoniously blending the different sides of his career.

Slide Show, again with Burton on vibraphone, successfully updates the sound of Matchbook. City Of Eyes, on the other hand, returns to the ballad form of Old Friends (particularly in the moving Far Cry).

Open Letter is a somewhat unfocused work, weighed down by the imposing presence of Peter Erskine.

If Oregon's music belongs increasingly less to jazz and increasingly more to the Baroque, the same cannot be said of Towner, who reveals a distinctly jazz-oriented soul on his solo albums. All things considered, the decisive influence on Towner was Bill Evans, namely the tradition of calm and lyrical melodicism.

The mediocre Lost & Found (ECM, 1996) was a quartet session with Denney Goodhew on sax, Marc Johnson on bass and Jon Christensen on drums.

Ana (ECM, 1997), a solo guitar album, is a classy show of melancholy beauty that weds sheer virtuoso performance (Veldt), neoclassical geometry and impressionistic soundpainting, but none of the 14 brief tracks stands out.

A Closer View (1998) was a collaboration with Gary Peacock.

Towner continued to favor the miniature over the suite on Anthem (ECM, 2001), a solo guitar album fragmented in 17 short pieces, and on Time Line (2006), even more varied in style.

Oregon's Prime (february 2003) featured new percussionist Marc Walker. Their 1000 Kilometers (2009), mostly composed by Towner, contains From a Dream and 1000 Kilometers.

Chiaroscuro (october 2008 - ECM, 2010) was a collaboration between Ralph Towner and Italian trumptetist and flugelhornist Paolo Fresu.

Oregon's In Stride (february 2010) collects both new and old compositions.

Family Tree (april 2012), mostly composed by Ralph Towner, featured new drummer Mark Walker.

Travel Guide (august 2012 - ECM, 2013) documents the guitar trio of Ralph Towner, Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel and Kazakhstan guitarist Slava Grigoryan.

Lantern (spring 2017), the first Oregon album in five years, features Paul McCandless (oboe, English horn, soprano saxo, bass clarinet), Mark Walker (drums, synthesizer) and Paolino Dalla Porta (double bass).

Towner released two solo guitar albums, My Foolish Heart (february 2016) and At First Light (february 2022), and died in 2026.