An Evening of Music and Theater for Collin Walcott

Collin Walcott (1945–1984) belonged to that rare constellation of musicians for whom the boundaries of an instrument were never quite synonymous with the boundaries of its tradition. Among the earliest artists to bring the sitar and tabla into sustained conversation with jazz, he approached the possibilities of intercultural improvisation with a curiosity grounded in years of rigorous study, including apprenticeships with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha. Yet his genius resided equally in the silences he allowed to gather around those instruments, where the inherited structures of one musical language could become welcoming to the intuitions of another. That sensibility found one of its most enduring expressions in Oregon, the extraordinary quartet he co-founded in the early 1970s with guitarist Ralph Towner, woodwind specialist Paul McCandless, and bassist Glen Moore after their shared experiences in the Paul Winter Consort. Together, they fashioned a vocabulary whose intricacies were…