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Show iTH Page 6 Park City ; f - '.1 J Sf v lit ; , ,ttJN -r X 1 Oregon: A New Sound (Oregon will be appearing ap-pearing in the tent at City Park Saturday; night at 7 p.m.) By Robert Palmer Reprinted from Rolling Stone Oregon's music isn't easy to define. The group's instrumentationoboe, instrumen-tationoboe, classical guitar, string bass and hand drums is odd enough, but odder still is its mix of influences. Paul Mc-candless Mc-candless is a classically trained oboist who used to be a jazz saxophonist. Ralph Towner, who records on his own for ECM and is probably the best-known musician in the band, uses classical guitar techniques and plays jazz piano something like Bill Evans. Glen Moore is more or less a jazzman, but plays his restrung, retuned bass in a highly unorthodox manner. And percussionist per-cussionist Collin Walcott is a solo artist for ECM as well as an accomplished ac-complished sitarist. "Personally," explained Walcott, "I feel more connected to folk and ethnic traditions and to classical and new music than I do to jazz. But part of our being together all this time has been the exchange of ideas; that's been a big part of our growth." The four musicians all white, in their thirties, well trained, articulate ar-ticulate and committed to developing improvisational Si :fl . . t ill music were sitting in Glen Moore's SoHo loft not long ago, still a little worn from forty days on the road. Oregon isn't used to that kind of concentrated touring. When the group got together in 1970, as a spinoff of the Paul Winter Win-ter Consort, work was scarce. (The name arose on the road. Towner and Moore, who had lived in Oregon, became, said Moore, "nostalgic for Oregon, where life was so much saner.") A series of releases on Vanguard, beginning with Music of Another Present Era in 1973, improved the picture somewhat, but it wasn't until 1978 that Oregon really took off, aided by a recording contract with Elektra, which will also issue the solo projects of Moore and McCandless. Mc-Candless. So how does Oregon define its music? "We play what feels appropriate," ap-propriate," began Walcott, who studied sitar and Indian tabla drums in hotels and airport waiting rooms while serving as Ravi Shankar's road manager. "And what rarely seems appropriate ap-propriate is straight-down-the-line traditional anything." He grinned impishly and the others flashed here-goes-Collin-again looks. "We never play a straight Indian raga, straight classical piece or straight jazz standard, but we play things that evoke all those styles." Much of what Oregon performs is written by Ralph Towner, the group's most prolific composer. He is a quiet, introverted man who often seems a little rumpled and distracted onstage, even when playing his classical guitar with remarkable exactitude and sensitivity. "Collin's effect has been very important his use of tuned drums and so on," he said. "When I'm writing for the group, I think of a third-world time feel. That's very important. As far as my own playing, my standards of tone production and articulation are strictly classical. At the same time, I spent years playing jazz piano in bars, and I belong there, too. I took my skills in jazz writing and applied them to something that I felt comfortable with for classical playing. So it's an amalgamation, but to me it feels right." "The music is a process of discovery," McCandless said. "We follow our instincts and our energy." Added Towner: "When we left the Winter Consort, which tended to play the same program over and over, we vowed that when we had our group we never would play the same program twice. We really wanted to improvise." im-provise." Not long after our conversation, Oregon gave its first concert at Carnegie Haill, a demanding two-and-a-half-hour program that was at least half improvised. In the past, the group structured its sets with a series of disparate tunes ("We rotate the responsibility for calling sets," Moore explained before the concert, "so that the music is entirely democratic") and then strung them together with free improvisations. At Carnegie Car-negie Hall, the improvisations tended to be considerably longer than the tunes they connected. These leaps into the unknown are particularly perilous because of Oregon's instrumentation. There is no trap drummer to hide momentary lapses or uncertainties uncertain-ties with splashy cymbal patterns"; pat-terns"; McCandless' oboe and horn blend with the other instruments in-struments instead of taking the lead; and Moore's bass playing is conversational rather than of the anchoring variety. So there were awkward moments when lines spun off in different directions or the improvisational dialogue grew too rarefied. But then the group would rally. One particularly riveting episode, began with Walcott playing a rhythmic vamp on African thumb piano and Towner contributing cross-rhythms on an iron bell. McCandless and Moore fell in, playing a wooden flute and a violin and sounding like some sort of piping village orchestra. Then, without losing momentum, the musicians eased into a texture of fragmented lines and scraps of melody that somehow ended up being almost straight jazz. It was a wonderfully inventive performance, perfor-mance, and nobody else could have pulled it off. It was pure Oregon. And A Sound That Needs No Introduction: 1 1 J iri" 1 X ,M I Or. hi 1 I The Utah Symphony The Utah Symphony will be performing under the tent in City Park on Sunday evening at 7 p.m. The festival finale will be a free pops concert presented by the reknown orchestra conducted by Andrean Watts. |