Oregon - Waterwheel
Wow, I just sussed that those two pictures come from the same photo shoot. Lookit that 1970s vest!
Can a band sound like its name? When we were kids and hadn't yet been to "The Coast," our earliest impressions of what somewhere called Oregon might be like were extensively shaped by this music.
I lied, by the way, when I said yesterday there are only two bands named after US states: I had Oregon & Alabama, but forgot Kansas. Carry on, my wayward son.
This Oregon bunch have been doing their thing, in one iteration or another, for over 50 years. You could even say they invented their own kind of musical genre, because the whole World Jazz agglomeration really blew up when they made the scene.
There were others, like Tony Scott and Joe Harriott before them, but this was the first all-star band to feature those sorts of hybrid sounds and take it to the masses.
They changed when their sitar-toting percussionist, Collin Walcott, passed away in 1984, so this show right here -- turning 40 today -- is kind of their last big concert from the radio before that, which features the original quartet.
Oregon
NDR Workshop 181
Studio 10
Grosser Sendesaal des NDR Funkhauses
Hamburg, Germany
6.30.1983
01 Blue Sun/Beacon/Along the Way
02 Travel By Night/There Was No Moon that Night/The Rapids
03 Waterwheel
04 Beside a Brook
05 Duette
06 Skyline
07 The Glide
08 Timeless
Total time: 2:00:09
disc break goes after Track 03
Ralph Towner - guitars, piano, synthesizer & trumpet
Collin Walcott - sitar, tabla & percussion
Glen Moore - bass & violin
Paul McCandless - soprano saxophone, oboe, English horn, flute & bass clarinet
pre-broadcast reels from the NDR archives
declipped and slightly retracked by EN, June 2023
626 MB FLAC/direct link
There are shirts of the album thumbnail, writ large, by the way. That's Seal Rock off the Oregon Coast.
That completes June, with Eugene, Oregon signing off for another month. I'll be back soon with July as we sail into summer, but do enjoy your two-hour, preFM (you can really hear the NDR $12,000 Neumann mics on this pristinely captured bad boy) vacation to the land of Oregon!--J.
