Quotes

“At the core of an OREGON concert is a joyful embracing of adventure, a willingness by four virtuoso improvisers to expose their creative processes to an audience. Rooted in jazz, but drawing from musical wellsprings all around the world, the quartet aspires to transcend its sources and create compelling, new music with every performance.”
– Jeff McLaughlin, The Boston Globe

“Fifteen years or so before new age, quasi-jazz, or world beat [bands]…turned cross cultural exotica into highly marketable pop music, OREGON had already broken through fences and established a distinctive voice in an essentially boundless musical territory…Today you can turn on a radio station…and hear endless streams of music prefigured in OREGON long ago.”
– Derek Richardson, Berkeley Express

“The key to OREGON’s success is their ability to meld their disparate tonal personalities into a consonant whole—even in the most malleable or playful of settings—the classical voicings of which never undermine their jazz foundations.”
– Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone

“ The shifting balance of composition and improvisation became an important aspect of the band’s music. Towner evolved into the chief composer although the other members contribute some original material, and his writing involves graceful melodies as well as complex harmonies and challenging meters. But collective improvisation is a central element in their musical approach, especially in OREGON’s concerts, forcing the players to come up with new ideas on the spot while always paying attention to the group dynamic.” – Derek Richardson, Berkeley Express

“OREGON is another improvising group, but for them improvising seems to be a means of evolving pieces rather than an end in itself.”
– Tom Johnson, The Village Voice

Woodwind player, Paul McCandless says of OREGON’s improvisations, “This music is a process of discovery. There is an implication of a direction inherent in each musical moment that leads to the next.” OREGON bassist Glen Moore says about their music, “We’re intensely interested in sound itself, the colors and shapes of sound…andwe never know ourselves how we’re going to get from one piece to another…what could be a quick little element one night could be drawn out, extended and thoroughly explored another.” Ralph Towner, explains, “My notion of a song, including the improvisation on that song, is that from the first sound you establish a character, a sense of motion; then you are committed to develop a history, a miniature lifetime that is a faithful development of the original atmosphere.”

“ Mark Walker couldn’t have been better suited for this gig if he’d enrolled in the OREGON Percussionist Correspondence Course, and since he’s at least 15 years younger than the rest of the band, he’s given them a sanguine new perspective: when OREGON showed up on Valentine’s Day weekend 1998 for only its second Chicago show of the 90’s…the music brimmed with a tangible joy.”
– Neil Tesser, Chicago Reader

“OREGON’s adventurously searching urgency has always been about more than mere entertainment, though there’s plenty of that in it, of the variety that challenges. Building upon European classical disciplines and American jazz traditions—transcending both—has well as many musics from the rest of the planet, their sound is characterized by an optimistic, forward-thinking strength. OREGON’s continually growing style is never out of fashion, and feels at home wherever it is heard. Their music is…always in the present tense, with equally scenic vistas of past and future. Time falls away and their music ends too soon… may there always be more…”
– Patrick Hinley, Jazz Times

“It is very rare indeed for the art of the brush on canvas and fingers on musical instruments to inhabit the same time, space and composition. But when it does a lifetime of magical experiences are born and stay with you forever. To do this the artists must make a myriad metaphysical leaps and transmigrations! A twist of fate that must make mind, body and soul dance with the re-invention of pure joy.
To do this requires re-locating the landscape of music to a canvas in the musician’s mind and the listener’s ear. There is no group of artists who can perform this magic like the musicians of the group Oregon.”
– Raul d’Gama Rose, AllAboutJazz.com