Jazz, Country Wrapped in This Package : Concert: Bandleader Tony Guerrero’s annual holiday gathering at the Coach House is ‘the best party I go to.’

Tony Guerrero has carved out a reputation locally as a young bandleader whose cool fluegelhorn musings are put to backbeat tunes, contemporary ballads and the occasional traditional jazz tune. His last romance-filled release, “Another Day, Another Dream,” climbed into the Top 20 of the Billboard Contemporary Jazz chart.

But the past year has brought some changes for the 26-year-old Costa Mesa resident. Would you believe Tony Guerrero, jazz-cat, is now also Tony Guerrero, producer and country-music songwriter?

It’s true. Guerrero, whose second annual Christmas concert is tonight at the Coach House, not only produced country singer Kelly Rae Alcott’s yet-to-be released album (she recently won a new-talent contest at the Crazy Horse), he wrote all the material as well.

“I actually started writing country music for a girl I knew back in college,” he said recently in a phone conversation. “I was really very anti-country at the time. She was from Bakersfield and her father was a piano player. So I spent time with the family and started doing gigs with them. It was very weird to find myself in that situation.

“But I met a lot of great players and gained respect for country music. The more I listened, the more I realized that country, jazz and rock all came out of the same music: the blues. It gives them a lot of similarities. I realized that I would have been closing myself off to a lot of good music by saying country is bad.”

What Guerrero likes best about country is its penchant for storytelling. “A lot of people listen to country just to dance, and it’s obviously great dance music--that’s what keeps it alive. But I like to close out the world and just sit and listen to it. There’s some great poets working the field right now. And I think it’s mainly the female singers who are the best storytellers--people like K. T. Oslin and Mary-Chapin Carpenter.”

Though he favors the current country scene for its lyrics, Guerrero says that musically he favors older performers such as Patsy Cline and Buck Owens. “Their music is more related to swing and blues, which is exactly what I like.”

In addition to producing Alcott’s country album, Guerrero showed his versatility by producing a hard-rock session for Clemons Hoffman, a Dutch guitarist he met during a tour of Europe in 1991. “You can’t limit yourself,” he explains.

Before honing his production skills while doing his own albums, Guerrero began producing during his days as a student at Cal State Fullerton. “I had some friends with a studio who basically charged me nothing, so any time I saved some money and could hire the equipment I would go into the studio to play around with different groups. As far as getting the sound of the instrument on tape, it’s the same for jazz, rock or country. But each genre has its own sound and its own concept and that’s what’s important to develop.”

In addition to spending time this year as a producer, Guerrero also has concentrated on his writing. In addition to the work he did for Alcott, he contributed a number of tunes to Kilauea saxophonist Greg Vail’s forthcoming recording, and has compiled enough tunes for two of his own albums.

“It’s been my most prolific year as a composer,” he says. “I think my writing has matured a lot, but the market seems to be going the other way. It’s less artistic, more pop- and money-oriented.”

Though he says he received a few offers to do albums of his own this year, “they were basically sell-your-soul deals, and I couldn’t give up on what I believe musically. I want to put out a record I can be proud of under my own terms.”

And he’s not abandoning his first love, jazz. “I’m still a jazz head, I’m still writing jazz tunes. But I find myself opening up to a lot of ideas other than jazz as well.”

Guerrero promises that most sides of his blossoming career will be on display during tonight’s Christmas concert. “There are a lot of annual Christmas shows, but not many jazz-based Christmas shows,” he says. “Christmas is the most spiritual of the holidays and music is my main spiritual outlet--that’s how I express myself. It makes for a great emotional tie-in.”

This will be the second year that Guerrero gathers his extended musical family to celebrate the season at the Coach House. “For me, it’s the best party I go to,” he says, “seeing all my musician friends backstage and all my other friends out in the audience. It gives the whole affair a real family feel.”

Along with his regular band members--bassist Dave Enos, drummer Joel Taylor and guitarist Gannin Arnold--the fluegelhornist will be joined by such notables as saxophonist Everette Harp, who’s fresh from an appearance at the Strand and riding high with the success of his recent solo recording for the Manhattan label. The two met a couple years back working with “Arsenio” drummer Chuck Morris’ band at the UCLA Jazz Festival.

Others on the long list of guests include guitarist Ricardo Silviera, bassist Brian Bromberg, saxophonist Greg Vail, keyboardist Freddie Ravel (who’ll replace regular Guerrero band mate Bill Cantos, who is touring with singer Diane Schuur), and guitarist Dave Murdy, who’ll open the show in a duo with vocalist Michael Martin. Holland-based pianist Frank Giebels (a straight-ahead player out of the Bill Evans school who recently recorded with drummer Chiz Harris) will also be on hand.

And, of course, Kelly Rae Alcott will be there doing a trio of country-minded Christmas tunes that Guerrero arranged.

* The Tony Guerrero Christmas Concert will be held tonight at 9 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Children are welcome. $15. (714) 496-8930.