Ralph Towner

At First Light is a solo album by Ralph Towner, the American guitarist who has recorded for ECM for more than fifty years. His first solo album, Diary, came out fifty years before this one, and playing alone has stayed at the centre of his work. Here he plays the classical guitar through eleven pieces, eight of his own and three borrowed melodies from American song and Irish tradition.

Towner recorded the album in February 2022 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, a few days before his 82nd birthday. Manfred Eicher produced, with Stefano Amerio as engineer, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due. In his liner note Towner writes that his compositions carry "trace elements of the many composers and musicians that have attracted me". He names among them George Gershwin, John Coltrane, John Dowland and Bill Evans. ECM also points to Baroque and Renaissance music as a lasting influence on his writing. Besides the originals he plays Hoagy Carmichael's Little Old Lady, Jule Styne's Make Someone Happy and the traditional Danny Boy.

Towner has described the classical guitar as "a very pianistic instrument capable of sophisticated polyphony and myriad tone colours", and the album bears that out. Guitarra Piccante returns to a piece from the repertoire of his group Oregon, its forward motion gathering complexity as it goes. Fat Foot is a short syncopated riff that leaves room for spontaneous asides. On Danny Boy he sets the melody over carefully voiced harmonies and bass lines, then lets an improvisation grow out of the theme. Ubi Sunt is a bittersweet melody with a repeated, knell-like bass note in its middle section, and Empty Stage closes the set with a dialogue between treble and bass.

Reviewers stressed the breadth of his sources and the clarity of the recorded sound. In The Times, Chris Pearson wrote: "He may be physically alone on his album, yet he has the ghostly accompaniment of many forebears." John Arnett of London Jazz News called it "a landmark recording" in 2023. Bayerischer Rundfunk observed that it is the first of his solo albums played entirely on the nylon-string concert guitar, without the twelve-string of earlier records.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2758, released on 17 March 2023, with Towner's liner note in the booklet.