MUSIC THE AVANT GARDENERS : Cultivated : Trumpeter Nate Birkey seizes the spotlight, but the cool-jazz foursome is more than just Birkey’s band.

It’s Saturday night at Soho, one of Santa Barbara’s premier jazz clubs. Revelers are reveling and are forced to rub elbows, both by choice and by the sheer law of physics.

For the benefit of the swollen crowd, the Avant Gardeners are kickin’ it, in their own way, on their own time.

Song titles are revealing of a deeper essence; Antonio Carlos Jobim’s sultry bossa nova tune “Quiet Nights” and, later, Duke Ellington’s “In a Mellow Tone” are two of the stronger selections in a late-night set. Under the circumstances, the joint is jumping in a decidedly cool fashion.

Chief Gardener Nate Birkey, he of mysterious charisma, subtle gossamer trumpet lines and understated voice, hunches over the microphone and leans into his phrases, shutting out the world.

It’s not surprising that Birkey’s hero, by his own admission, was the late, great trumpeter (and sometime singer) Chet Baker. Birkey closes a set with an original, “My Heart Belongs to You (Tonight),” that sounds like a tune from an unwritten show.

Birkey may seize the spotlight, but the Avant Gardeners is more than Birkey’s band. An integrated whole, it is composed of four twentysomething musicians who share a passion for cool jazz. Pianist Jon Horvitz lays down a clean blanket of chordal support. Bassist John Hench attends dutifully to the basics, and drummer Dave Minolli underscores the whole package with tidy rhythmic accents and fancy brushwork.

A year after forming--almost accidentally--the Avant Gardeners now have regular club work, a faithful following and a fine self-produced album, titled “Kickin’ It,” to their name.

They continue to pull in swarming crowds and are busy making jazz safe for club-goers, young and not-so-young, many of whom were weaned on anything but jazz.

As for the name, it’s more about wordplay than truth-in-advertising. No, they don’t answer to the call of the avant garde; they grab hold of ageless standards and treat them with respect.

It all began as a spinoff of Spencer the Gardener, that perennially popular Santa Barbara surf-Latin-jazz-camp group that Birkey plays in.

A day earlier, Birkey sat down to talk at another favorite downtown haunt, Mel’s bar.

The venerable old watering hole sits snug and rugged amid the Gucci kitsch of the new Paseo Nuevo mall (the bar refused to budge when the mall started rolling). The bar is a comfortable old standby, like, say, “Fly Me to the Moon”--one of the best tracks on the Avant Gardeners album.

These days, Mel’s jukebox plays the Cars and the Rolling Stones. Not long ago, it was stuffed with gems by Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, the type of suave musical fare Birkey cut his teeth on.

Ironically, jazz and pop from decades past--thanks to the resurgence of mainstream jazz and popular young sensations such as Harry Connick Jr.--suddenly sound fresher than, say, the Rolling Stones.

“Seeing all these younger jazz players out now, I feel a little bit old,” Birkey says, grinning. “I’m 28 now. I’m sure there are a lot of older, middle-aged players who are frustrated with the whole thing, saying, “I’ve been doing that for 30 years.’ ”

Birkey has been doing it for at least half that long. Growing up in Evergreen, Colo., in a musical family, Birkey was a young jazz aficionado who never really listened to pop music until college.

“My dad had a lot of old Dixieland albums and a lot of Herb Alpert records,” he says. “I think he was the first trumpet player that I listened to. But as soon as I found Miles Davis, he became God to me. ‘Sketches of Spain’ was the first album I bought. I loved the sound of his trumpet.”

After high school, Birkey went to the Berklee School of Music in Boston for a year, then to Seattle Pacific University before moving to Santa Barbara with an older sister in 1984.

He worked at odd jobs and later enrolled in UC Santa Barbara, but the real turning point--leading to his current musical path--was meeting Spencer Barnitz, who was already the lead singer in the once-a-week institution known as the Wedding Band.

Birkey literally spun into Barnitz’s orbit, becoming a Wedding Band member and, with Barnitz, laying the groundwork for Spencer the Gardener.

Birkey even became an honorary member of Barnitz’s old band, the Tan, which briefly relocated to London to try their fate, before breaking up for good.

Unfortunately, Birkey was the last to fly into London and the customs men at Heathrow weren’t very accommodating. “They found out I was going there to work and didn’t like that idea. I wasn’t a very good liar at that point. So they deported me. That was the end of my stint with the Tan.”

Meanwhile, Birkey was also honing his jazz skills with a quintet--featuring the current Avant Gardeners plus saxist Martin Matthews--that played every week at the old Borsodi’s in Isla Vista. Over the course of their early gigging, Minolli became a convert to the cool touch.

“I was originally into big band music,” he commented during a break at Soho, “playing loud. My idol was Gene Krupa. But these guys force-fed me this stuff, and I eventually fell for it.”

Forming a bona fide band came about in May when a fraternity asked Birkey to play at “a little wine and cheese soiree. I’d always wanted to try singing, and it was only a frat party, so who would care anyway? I sang a couple of songs, I think ‘There Will Never Be Another You’ and ‘My Funny Valentine.’ ”

Pleased with the results, the players talked about making the group official. The name was settled on and, the next day, Birkey booked the first date at Joseppi’s. Almost immediately, there was an audience, hopping over from the burgeoning Spencer the Gardener following.

That segment of the audience “seems to have thinned out a bit lately,” Birkey says. “Now we’re getting more of the real jazz fans, an older crowd, which is good.”

The Avant Gardeners’ repertoire goes beyond the usual crop of standards we’ve all heard too many times. Handpicked material complements the band’s smooth-to-the-touch concept. Birkey explains that settling on music “takes some research, going to the library, going through books. And if I’m singing something, I have to feel something about the lyrics. I tend to go for the darker tunes; Cole Porter wrote a lot of darker tunes.

“And it’s a real challenge to make those tunes sound fresh. We have a problem with all of them sounding the same when we play. We’re trying to figure out how to change them around. I like to have sections with only two people playing at a time--bass and trumpet or drums and trumpet, whatever.”

Birkey also takes his new trumpet-voice interplay seriously. “When I play, I try to think of it as a voice and when I sing, I try to think of it as a horn. I haven’t quite gotten there yet. I think with Chet Baker, the way he phrased with his trumpet and sang was almost exactly the same.”

The Avant Gardeners have a full schedule in July, playing dates at Soho and the Sea Cove in Santa Barbara, and also at Yoshi’s and Cafe Dunard in the Bay Area. Following those out-of-town gigs, Birkey will put on his Spencer the Gardener hat and play two other Bay Area spots with that group.

Spencer the Gardener, now with two self-made albums out on their own label, Love That Records, is on the verge of something bigger. They have a publishing deal and a L.A. management company bucking for a major album deal. Between the Gardener, the Gardeners and the Wedding Band, Birkey plays an average of five nights a week.

Within the Avant Gardeners ranks, though, extra musical duty is calling. Horvitz is leaving the band this summer to pursue a post-doctoral degree in psychology at Princeton. Hench is finishing a Ph.D. in the fall and will most likely be moving on. But, whatever the impending personnel changes, Birkey is intent on continuing to till the jazz turf.

“When I started the Avant Gardeners, I realized how far I have to go,” Birkey says. “It’s going to take awhile. I feel like I’m still trying to sound like Chet Baker too much.

“I think when you’re just starting to do something, like sing or play an instrument, you’re going to initially imitate who you like. I’m really trying to develop my own style.”

* WHERE AND WHEN

The Avant Gardeners will play tonight and July 28 at Soho, 21 W. Victoria St., Santa Barbara. On Saturday, they will perform at the Sea Cove, 801 Shoreline Drive, Santa Barbara.