Ralph Towner

Diary is the first entirely solo album by Ralph Towner, recorded for ECM in April 1973 and released in 1974. Alone with 12-string guitar, classical guitar, piano and gongs, he builds a private, notebook-like record in which two of his best-known compositions found their definitive form. Jazz, above all the harmonic world of Bill Evans, meets classical guitar writing and Brazilian music in a single, unforced voice.

Towner had already made Trios/Solos for the label, recorded in New York in November 1972 with Glen Moore, Paul McCandless and Collin Walcott, his partners in the group Oregon. For Diary he went to Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, where the album was made over two days, 4 and 5 April 1973. Manfred Eicher produced, with Kurt Rapp and Martin Wieland as engineers. Overdubbing let Towner accompany himself, so pieces such as Ogden Road, the longest track, become duets between his 12-string guitar and his own piano.

Icarus, which ECM counts among the definitive versions on the record, pairs 12-string guitar and piano, opening out into plucked harmonics and piano improvisation. In Erg he sets two guitars against each other, one of which, in Tyran Grillo's words on ECM Reviews, "Towner scrapes, jangles, and taps" as a percussive backdrop. The album closes with The Silence of a Candle, credited to Towner and Walcott, which Towner plays at the piano alone as a short, quiet coda.

The record's restraint is its point: no rhythm section, no other voices, and a sound that leaves space around every note. Reviewing it in Germany, Die Zeit described the result as "an acoustic wonderworld". Grillo finds only the abstract Images Unseen less fully realised than the rest. Its mixture of overdubbed duets and unaccompanied pieces gives a clear early picture of Towner as composer and performer at once, already fully formed on his first record alone.

This CD is the 2019 reissue in ECM's Touchstones series, which brings key albums from the catalogue back into print in card sleeves. Diary was first released in 1974 as ECM 1032, and the CD keeps its original eight-track programme.