Ralph Towner was born March 1, 1940, in Chehalis, Washington, into a musical family — his mother taught piano, his father played trumpet — and he was already improvising at the keyboard by age three or four. He moved to Oregon as a child and grew up playing trumpet, French horn, and piano before picking up guitar at 22. In 1958 he enrolled at the University of Oregon, first as an art major before switching to music composition, studying with Homer Keller and graduating in 1963. It was there he met bassist Glen Moore, who would become a lifelong musical partner. Guitar had entered the picture almost by accident during his university years, and it sent him to Vienna, where he studied classical guitar and Renaissance lute transcription with Professor Karl Scheit at the Vienna Academy of Music across two stretches, 1963-64 and 1967-68.

Towner moved to New York City in 1968 and freelanced on both piano and guitar around the city's folk and jazz scenes, working with musicians ranging from trumpeter Freddie Hubbard to singer-songwriter Tim Hardin. In August 1969 he and Glen Moore backed Hardin's set at the Woodstock festival; the Hardin gigs also connected the pair with Paul Winter's Consort ensemble, and in particular with multi-instrumentalist Collin Walcott. Towner and Moore joined the Consort, where they also crossed paths with oboist Paul McCandless. In 1970, the four of them — Towner, McCandless, Moore, and Walcott — left Paul Winter to found Oregon, a chamber-jazz quartet built almost entirely around acoustic instrumentation: Towner on guitars and piano, McCandless on oboe and reeds, Moore on bass, and Walcott on tabla, sitar, and hand percussion. It was one of the very few working jazz groups of the era to make that acoustic, genre-blending sound — folk, Indian classical, and European chamber music filtered through jazz improvisation — its entire aesthetic identity rather than an occasional detour.

Oregon signed to Vanguard Records, and its 1972 debut, Music of Another Present Era, earned a Grammy nomination the following year. That same year, Towner appeared as a guest on Weather Report's I Sing the Body Electric, a session that helped bring him to the attention of Manfred Eicher, the founder of the young German label ECM Records (Eicher and Towner were introduced in New York through bassist Dave Holland). It began a working relationship that ran for the rest of Towner's life: every one of his ECM leader albums, and most of Oregon's, was produced by Eicher, whose own career founding and shaping ECM's aesthetic is covered separately on JazzProfiles.com in his profile.

Towner made his debut as an ECM leader in 1973 with Trios/Solos, followed the next year by Diary, a fully solo record built on his pioneering technique of overdubbing layered guitar and piano parts — a signature he would return to throughout his career. The mid-1970s brought two duo records apiece with vibraphonist Gary Burton (Matchbook, 1975, and Slide Show, 1986) and guitarist John Abercrombie (Sargasso Sea, 1976, and Five Years Later, 1982), plus what AllMusic has called his "crowning achievement as a leader," the 1975 quartet album Solstice, featuring Jan Garbarek, Eberhard Weber, and Jon Christensen, which he followed with a 1977 sequel, Sound and Shadows. Further ensemble work through the late 1970s and 1980s included the trio session Batik (1978, with Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette), the quintet date Old Friends, New Friends (1979, with Kenny Wheeler), and Blue Sun (1983), his first record to bring a Prophet 5 synthesizer into his largely acoustic sound world.

Oregon suffered a devastating loss in November 1984 when Collin Walcott was killed in a car accident in Magdeburg, East Germany, a month after the group finished recording Crossing, his last studio session with the band. Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu, a longtime friend of Walcott's, joined for 1987's Ecotopia, and the group continued recording and touring for decades afterward — a 2000 collaboration with the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra, Oregon in Moscow, brought the band four further Grammy nominations, including a nod for "The Templars" as Best Instrumental Composition in 2001.

Towner's solo and small-group ECM catalog kept expanding through the 1990s and 2000s: Open Letter (1992, with Peter Erskine on drums — whose own career is profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com), two duo records with bassist Gary Peacock (Oracle, 1994, and A Closer View, 1998 — Peacock is likewise profiled separately on this site), the solo records Lost and Found (1996), Ana (1997), Anthem (2001), and Time Line (2006), and a trio session outside his usual ECM orbit, If Summer Had Its Ghosts (1997), co-led with drummer Bill Bruford (also profiled separately here) and bassist Eddie Gomez on Bruford's own Discipline Global Mobile label. A quartet reunion with bassist Charlie Haden, drummer Jerry Granelli, and guitarist Robben Ford, recorded in Seattle in 1988, finally saw release in 2005 as Helium Tears; Haden's own career is profiled separately on JazzProfiles.com as well.

In his final decade and a half, Towner recorded regularly with the RSI studio in Lugano, Switzerland, producing Chiaroscuro (2009, a duo with trumpeter Paolo Fresu), the guitar trio Travel Guide (2013, with Wolfgang Muthspiel and Slava Grigoryan — the same trio had already recorded together in 2008 under the group name "MGT"), My Foolish Heart (2017), and At First Light (2023), his final studio album, which closed with his own reading of "Danny Boy." He died January 18, 2026, at a hospital in Rome, Italy, at age 85. Obituaries and tributes ran in DownBeat, the New York Times, NPR member stations, and ECM's own site, remembering him as one of the defining instrumental voices of the label's first half-century and one of the very few jazz musicians to build an entire career around the acoustic guitar as a lead voice.

Towner named three forces as the raw material of his musical language: Brazilian music of the early-to-mid 1960s, the interactive trio conception of the Bill Evans Trio, and his own classical guitar training — sources he said he deliberately abstracted "until they were no longer recognisable." That fusion, built almost entirely around acoustic guitar and piano, both as a soloist and as co-founder of Oregon, made him one of the defining voices of ECM's chamber-jazz aesthetic. His overdubbing technique, layering guitar and piano textures within a single recording, remains a distinctive signature across his catalog, and his commitment to the 12-string and classical guitar as lead jazz instruments — rare in a genre dominated by horns, piano, and electric guitar — gave him a sonic identity few other players in jazz have matched.