For the ninth installment in its 1970s ECM Special series, Trio Records in Japan presented its second of three artist spotlights, this time devoted to Ralph Towner, whose guitars have long served as measuring instruments for ECM’s most elusive cartographic spaces. The compilation begins where many listeners would instinctively begin, with “Icarus,” his most enduring composition, presented here in the version from Matchbook, his duo album with Gary Burton. Its melodic intelligence never advertises itself as cleverness. The tune gathers its lyric weight by degrees, enlarging its private glow with intimate attention to detail. One may still argue that the more definitive version appeared on Diary, and that album is represented here by “Erg,” a piece in which Towner turns the guitar into a small percussive cosmos. Through fingered attack and body-struck resonance, he draws out a molecular energy.

Among Towner’s early collaborations, Dis with Jan Garbarek remains one of the most luminous. Representing that unforgettable album is “Yr,” where Garbarek’s soprano moves over spiraling guitar lines with an almost disembodied precision, treating unexpected shifts in key and register as the very fabric of reality. The piece seems to fold distance inward, so that melody becomes a corridor and accompaniment becomes a second mind thinking beneath it. More surprising is the inclusion of “Palãcio de Pinturas” from Egberto Gismonti’s Sol Do Meio Dia. It can be easy to forget that these two masters met on this project, yet in the pairing of six- and twelve-string guitars, their affinity sounds immediate, almost inevitable. Their shared sense of color never becomes painterly in any decorative sense. Seemingly simple arpeggios carry more than their apparent weight, while incisive melodies surface as dark fins cutting through a glassy expanse.

The anthology’s pull toward open waters finds its most explicit form in “Staircase,” taken from Sargasso Sea, Towner’s wonderful collaboration with John Abercrombie. The tune is aptly named, but its geometry is stranger than the title suggests. It ascends without promising arrival, arranging angles of sound into a structure that feels both designed and half-dreamed. Abercrombie and Towner draw a shared diagram in the air, then let its lines tremble toward lyric mystery. From there, the compilation closes with “Suite: 3 X 12” from Trios/Solos, a carefully wrought composition in which Towner’s love of harmonics shines through the twelve-string with crystalline force. The work’s final movement presses harder against its rhythmic core, winding its attack with a precision that never forfeits wonder. Even at his most exacting, Towner refuses the tyranny of mere control.

What emerges from this selection is not simply a portrait of a guitarist, but a study in how something as fleeting as touch can serve a permanent architectural purpose. In these performances, virtuosity is never far from  restraint. To strike a string without dominating it, to enter silence without colonizing it, to let the instrument answer in its own difficult grammar: this is the quiet revelation of the set. A guitar, in Towner’s hands, leaves the world unpossessed.