One of the earliest and finest exponents of world jazz, Oregon was formed in 1971. From the beginning, the band has avoided most jazz conventions, with blues and swing given much less prominence in favour of other forms, notably including world influences, and has also focussed more on an acoustic sound. Percussionist Collin Walcott played tabla, sitar and dulcimer, among other instruments, while bassist Glen Moore also doubled on clarinet, viola and piano, and the group's front line was formed by a double-reedist (Paul McCandless) and an acoustic guitarist (Ralph Towner).
The roots of Oregon began in 1960 at the University of Oregon with undergraduate students Towner and Moore who formed a musical friendship on bass and piano inspired by Bill Evans and later by Brazilian music. Moore earned a degree in history and literature and Towner completed his in composition, taking up guitar in the process.
In the mid 1960s, they both travelled to Europe. Towner studied classical guitar in Vienna with Karl Scheit, while Moore studied classical bass in Copenhagen and sat in with such greats as Ben Webster and Dexter Gordon.
By 1969, both were living in New York City, playing with a community of young musicians who formed the great fusion bands of the 1970s, including Weather Report and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Performing with folk singer Tim Hardin at the 1969 Woodstock Festival, Towner and Moore encountered two members of the Paul Winter Consort who introduced them to the music of that group. In the studio with Hardin, Towner and Moore connected with sitar and tabla player Walcott, who had studied ethnomusicology at UCLA and served as road manager for Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha. On a break at that session, Towner and Walcott played their first guitar/sitar duet in the hallways of Columbia Studios.
By 1970, Towner, Moore and Walcott had joined the Paul Winter Consort for a 50-concert US tour where they quickly formed an alliance with its oboist, Paul McCandless, who had studied at the Manhattan School of Music. During that initial tour, Towner began composing a new repertoire of original material including Icarus, which has since become a standard.
The early development of Oregon took root in private jam sessions, where the four began investigating new musical possibilities after getting a taste of collective improvisation on tour with the Consort. Winter’s group introduced them to the idea of performing concerts with uncommon combinations of instruments in an eclectic variety of musical styles. Incorporating these elements, Oregon emerged with a unique synthesis of European classical instrumentation, American jazz harmony and ethnic influences from around the globe.
The idea of recording their own music first arose at a party, where Towner and Walcott were entertaining friends in their guitar/sitar configuration. The group was offered the use of an 8-track studio in the Hollywood Hills, known as The Farm. A short-lived independent label in Los Angeles subsidised 6 weeks of taping and mixing, but the company did not succeed in selling the results to a major label and the tape went into storage for 10 years before its Vanguard release called Our First Record.
In 1971, the group made its debut in New York as Thyme - Music of Another Present Era, a name designed to answer the question of what music they played. McCandless later proposed the name Oregon alluding to Towner's and Moore’s home state.
The next year, Vanguard signed Oregon, recording a new set of original compositions which became the band’s debut album, Music of Another Present Era. In that same period, they made Trios and Solos for ECM, a new label in Europe. The Vanguard album introduced them to their American audience and through their association with ECM they developed their European following with tours beginning in 1974 where they received critical acclaim and growing recognition in the international community.
Six years and 9 albums later, Oregon moved to Elektra/Asylum Records. Its first release on that label, Out of the Woods, reached a decidedly wider audience and was rated as one of the best jazz albums of that year. Over the years, the group's versatility grew, covering a vast array of instruments.
At the end of Oregon’s contract with Elektra and with the birth of Walcott’s daughter in 1980, the group members took a year long sabbatical during which they pursued their individual solo careers. When they reassembled, Oregon’s unique fusion gained an electric dimension through Towner’s addition of keyboard synthesisers. The group recorded two more albums for ECM with the original personnel.
They had reached a peak of popularity when in November 1984, Walcott and manager Jo Härting were killed in the former East Germany in an auto accident involving Oregon’s tour bus, leaving the ECM album Crossing as Walcott's final document.
This left Oregon with the seemingly impossible task of filling an enormous vacuum. They reunited for the first time in May 1985 at a memorial concert for Walcott in New York where the dazzling Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu joined them to pay tribute. Gurtu, who studied tablas and jazz drumming, accepted an invitation to work with Oregon in 1986 and was included on a tour of the Indian subcontinent. Over a 5-year period, he played on 3 albums with the band: Ecotopia on ECM, 45th Parallel on Epic and Always, Never, and Forever, the group's first recording on Intuition. After the departure of Gurtu, the three original members continued their creative development as a trio making two CDs - Troika and Beyond Words.
For the 1996 Intuition album Northwest Passage, the group incorporated two great percussionists, Mark Walker and Arto Tuncboyician of Armenia. Walker, who also performs and records with Cuban expatriate Paquito D’Rivera, became the new fourth member of Oregon in 1997 and together with Towner, Moore and McCandless travelled to Moscow in June 1999 to record the double album for Intuition with the Moscow Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra entitled Oregon In Moscow. This project is the band’s debut recording of their orchestral repertoire. Developing since the Winter Consort days, this prodigious body of work had been performed with various orchestras but never recorded.