Ralph Towner
Open Letter

Dear Mr. Towner,

each time I finish listening to your "Open Letter," I end up wondering what you might have written in this open letter of yours. And above all, I wondered who, in your opinion, should have read it. Maybe, who knows?, the letter is open to those like me, who are not devotees of you and your musical genre...

I look at this cover, it seems like a stretch of coast, a fjord, but the colors don't match. It looks like a model, but of what? Something that doesn't exist in nature. It's cold, it's icy, yet inviting. It's recorded in cold Oslo, and maybe you composed it there as well. Is that so, Mr. Towner?

So, what might you have written in this open letter, Mr. Towner? And what does this cover represent, at least to you? Where is "Magnolia Island," where can one witness the "Nightfall" that you saw? To what does your "Sigh" refer? What is the "Infection" due to and what is an "Alar"?

Here, I listen to "The Sigh" and even you seem uncertain, to be honest. The notes of your guitar seem like a calm and warm sea until a gigantic leaden cloud bursts in, loaded with doubts, yearnings, tensions. Mediterranean in summer or Baltic in winter? Choose, Mr. Towner. As for me, even when you return to relaxation, I prefer not to trust it. You'll forgive me, won't you? And besides, I even think I did well since the ending you chose for the piece is almost horror.

Your music is imaginative, I would say subliminal, or am I just fantasizing too much? It's a sound that never finds peace, that even when it seems to live on the easy and melodic, it immediately puts you back on balance. In "Adrift" it seems to want to become relaxing, and then returns to its own territory. Percussions over a carpet of synthesizers that perpetually hold their breath: a wise choice, Sir. Meanwhile, your guitar unnerves itself, almost as if it were trying to break out of this transparent rubber ball it's trapped in, in search of rhythm, melody, or relaxation. But it's a bluff; you don't want to go anywhere, do you? Admit it, Mr. Towner, and admit that that title and cover mean nothing, come on! Your guitar stirs only because this way you draw more tension never capable of being mellowed on edge (or "fjords"?) of the skin.

In "Alar," you restore intimacy, I would say reflectiveness, to a piece with too "exclamatory" an opening. It seems to call for the halt of every advance, to invite one to pause, to contemplate, to understand each other. But logic isn't involved, and perhaps neither is emotion. And there is nothing to understand, of course. You manage to estrange with your touch, seemingly doubtful, even the sweetest melody of a couple of covers, and you even seem a bit suggestive, excuse me if I sound a bit rude. It's just that it seems to me as if each of your phrases were a sentence ending with a nice "eh?", as if to say "isn't that so?". I don't know if it is, but it doesn't seem so to me, if you really want me to say it all.

In "Magic Pouch" your notes travel so lightly that if you were to toss your scores onto a lily pad in a pond, they wouldn't sink. But satisfy my curiosity: you seem born for a sunset Brazilian bossa nova or a watered-down samba, so why are you in Oslo? Why do you put a sort of artificial fjord on the cover and populate it with a host of tracks, each more unsettling than the last?

You know what? By now I'm at track number nine and I have, nonetheless, no longer any intention of understanding you. In "Magnolia Island," for half of it, you seem like Steve Howe grappling with a suite discussing gnomes and fairies, while in the other half you seem like a rock star engaged in a solo with the wrong guitar. Now that I have given up, it could be anything, believe me. Even a nocturnal, metropolitan, claustrophobic composer, like your concluding pearl "Nightfall."

Apart from the tracks, their procession, the melodies, the variations, I must say that about you what I like and fear the most is the intensity you express, the tension that has swept me into an artificial maelstrom, reproduced in an amusement park,

I am not an expert in your music, Mr. Towner, I say it again, and this page of mine will certainly not do you honor the way pages of more knowledgeable reviewers on the "subject" have done. But I know that many artists count you among their sources of inspiration; I know that you have an unmissable performance and compositional style, a vast solo and non-solo production, and that the pleasure for an "evocative" sound, whatever that may mean, has always accompanied you. This "Open Letter," however, is a bluff, perhaps the least correct way to approach your music, isn't it? Or not? In the end, to clear my mind, I'll need to delve further into the subject, and thus listen to more of your works, isn't that so?

Then we can say that it is the least correct but the most effective way.

Eh?