Oregon is the first album the quartet Oregon made for ECM, recorded in 1983 by the original line-up of Ralph Towner, Paul McCandless, Collin Walcott and Glen Moore. A pioneer band in the meeting of jazz, chamber music and non-Western traditions, the group had formed in 1970. This record found it after a break and with a new colour, Towner's synthesizer.

Speaking to DownBeat in May 1983, Towner explained that after twelve years together the band had paused for fourteen months, out of a record contract, before regrouping. "By then I had gotten the synthesizer, which added a whole new dimension to the band," he said. With an ECM deal in hand they recorded their first album in over three years in March 1983, at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg. Manfred Eicher produced and Martin Wieland engineered. Towner plays Prophet 5 synthesizer, piano, classical and 12-string guitar. McCandless moves between soprano saxophone, oboe, cor anglais, bass clarinet, musette and tin flute, Walcott adds sitar, tongue drum and percussion, and Moore plays double bass, viola and piano.

The writing is shared among all four. Towner's The Rapids opens the album with a set of bold chords and, in the words of the critic Tony Augarde, "the impression of fresh fast-running water". Walcott's Taos balances low rumbling sounds against high flutes, and McCandless's There Was No Moon That Night sets his bass clarinet against Towner's guitar in a dusky, slow-moving piece. Moore wrote Impending Bloom with Samantha Moore, looking forward to the birth of his child, and it closes the record on a persistent, driving pulse with soprano saxophone on top.

Reviewing the 2008 reissue for MusicWeb International, Augarde called Taos "an impressionistic masterpiece" and praised players who could respond to one another "virtually telepathically". The album gained added weight as one of the last recordings by this line-up. Walcott, whose sitar and tabla had done much to shape the band's early openness to music from other cultures, was killed in a car accident in 1984.

CD, ECM 1258, first released in 1983 and reissued in 2008 in the Touchstones series, the line of mid-price catalogue reissues ECM launched that year.