Howard Alden Is the Life of the Party : Jazz: The guitarist from a younger generation of musicians is a star of the sellout weekend music festival. The Huntington Beach native also blazes new trails with his banjo.

Despite war and recession, the fourth annual San Diego Jazz Party, founded by the late William Muchnic of La Jolla and run for the last two years by his widow, Beverly, was a 500-seat sellout for its three long sessions of mainstream music over the weekend.

The two dozen-plus players ranged from veterans like bassist Milt Hinton, 80, and saxmen Marshall Royal, 78, and Flip Phillips, 76 next week, to such relative youths as trombonist Dan Barrett and guitarist Howard Alden, both in their early 30s and both, coincidentally, friends from their growing-up days in Southern California.

The lineup confirmed Times jazz critic Leonard Feather’s recent observation that fine jazz-playing is being renewed by a new generation of precociously good instrumentalists.

Alden, a youthful-looking 32, grew up in Huntington Beach, playing the banjo for money at pizza parlors when he was not yet into his teens. “I found an old four-string banjo around the house. I think it belonged to a sporty uncle of mine,” Alden said over the weekend.

He took the instrument to a local music store to check it out. Charles Shortino, a veteran sideman then teaching at the store, urged Alden to learn to play it. “He was wonderful,” Alden said. “He got me to learn tunes (the chord changes as well as the melodies) and to read music.”

Alden discovered he had an aptitude for the banjo, which in retrospect is not unlike a preteen Ted Williams finding he could hit a baseball. Barely into teen-age himself, Alden started sitting in with a group at a pizza parlor. When the group moved on, the manager persuaded a 12-year-old Alden to take over the job.

By the time he was in high school, Alden had moved on to the guitar, been deeply impressed by the sounds of Charlie Christian, Barney Kessel and Joe Pass and, possibly most importantly, could drive a car. “I was doing gigs all over the area. I’d drive back from a gig at 3 in the morning, grab a little sleep and try to stay awake in German class. Somehow I kept a very good grade point average, all A’s and Bs.”

As a sideman in various ad hoc groups, he also learned to play by ear. “Somebody would say, ‘Let’s do “You Took Advantage of Me.” ’ I’d say, ‘I don’t know it,’ and the pianist would play the melody and I’d say, ‘Oh, OK.’ ”

Unfortunately, he said, there are fewer and fewer places where young musicians can sit in and get that kind of experience. “They’ve kind of disappeared.”

He made a brief, one-semester stab at college, but the call of a career already begun was too strong. Alden moved to Hollywood and studied at Howard Roberts’ Guitar Institute of Technology (“GIT!”), a year of intensive work with Roberts himself and guests like Joe Pass and Herb Ellis.

“I was doing gigs, casuals like weddings, just basically playing.” He was 18. He played at actor Jerry Van Dyke’s short-lived supper club in Encino, came to the attention of pianist Page Cavanaugh, with whom he worked briefly and who recommended him to singer Mavis Rivers, who introduced him to veteran vibes man Red Norvo, who added him to his combo for a lengthy engagement in Atlantic City, N.J. Alden was 19 turning 20.

“It was my first trip east and I liked the climate--the musical climate,” he said. On days off he went up to New York, tasting the musical scene and, of course, sitting in. In 1982, after a few years of commuting, he resettled permanently in Manhattan.

As 1983 began, he was working with pianist Joe Bushkin at the Hotel Carlyle and starting to be a busy recording artist. He had made his debut on a West Coast album with Eddie Miller and Wild Bill Davison in 1981.

By now Alden spends between half and three-quarters of his days on the road, at Nice and other European jazz festivals, at jazz parties like San Diego, touring with a quintet he and Dan Barrett formed (Alden urged Barrett, who grew up in Costa Mesa, to tackle New York in 1983). Alden works frequently with the lyrical and occasionally irascible trumpet player Ruby Braff. He and Braff begin a quartet gig in Washington later this week.

(“He’s a perfectionist and he’s absolutely uncompromising,” Alden said of Braff, “but he’s wonderful to work with. He establishes a great rapport with the audience in a hurry. But he can be caustic when he thinks guys aren’t measuring up.”)

At San Diego, among his other appearances, Alden did a brief banjo gig with the pianist Dick Hyman, with whom he also works and records frequently. “I always, from the beginning, wanted to play jazz on the banjo,” Alden said. “It’s mostly known for the novelty stuff but it can do more.” Demonstrating the novelty side, he played Harry Reser’s “The Cat and the Dog,” complete with plucked animal sounds. Then he and Hyman did a blazing version of Jelly Roll Morton’s “Shreveport Stomp” and a relatively obscure Ellington tune, “Drop Me Off in Harlem.”

In performance, bent into the guitar strings with fierce concentration, Alden will suddenly rear back, grinning, as if pleasantly astonished at what his fingers and the instrument have wrought. Like Joe Pass, he has great technical skill, capable of lightning runs and swift chords that suggest not one but two or more guitars are at work. But his essential style is lyrical, with beautifully constructed melodies that flow out of and enlarge upon the basic tune.

“I always try to maintain the illusion that I know where I’m going,” he said, grinning. “I keep the melody in my head as well as the chord changes, so that you’re creating logical melodic sequences. It’s hard to analyze it. You just do it.”

Braff, he added, has been one of his most influential mentors and indeed Braff’s own style, of marvelously embellished melodic constructions, is similar. Another influence, he said, was the innovative pianist Thelonious Monk. Alden has also greatly admired the veteran Los Angeles guitarist George Van Eps and last week recorded an album with Van Eps for Concord, which should be out later this year.

At San Diego, Alden also did a too-brief two guitar set with Marty Grosz, son of the German satirical artist George Grosz. Grosz, who can make the guitar sound like a banjo, and Alden, who can give the banjo something of the sound of a guitar, are a fine combination.

A big band, organized and led by reedman Bob Wilber and augmented by a half-dozen local musicians, did a stand-out set of Ellington, Goodman and Basie arrangements, including an all-hands-on-deck ride-out of “Jumping at the Woodside.”

A Wilber original, a haunting clarinet piece he calls “Clarion Song,” was perhaps the most impressive item in the set. Like Howard Alden’s guitar, it affirmed an old and sometimes neglected truth: that jazz can swing quietly and beautifully, as well as robustly.