Description
Alden and Ruby first met in 2004 when Ruby was touring with Pearl Django and Alden sat in with the group. They later developed an ongoing musical friendship, with Ruby traveling to New York City for lessons and the two appearing together periodically at festivals and venues including DjangoFest Northwest, DjangoFest San Francisco, Jazz Alley, and the Sacramento Jazz Jubilee.
Howard Alden is a jazz guitarist known for his work as a leader and sideman over several decades, as well as his contribution to the soundtrack of Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999), which brought renewed attention to Django-style jazz guitar.
Greg Ruby is a guitarist, composer, and bandleader whose work focuses on swing-era jazz, original compositions, and related acoustic traditions. He has led ensembles, recorded albums as a leader, and worked as an educator and writer.
The performance takes place in the intimate, acoustically refined setting of the White Horse, offering a close-up listening environment for acoustic guitar.
More About Howard:
Howard Alden was born in Newport Beach, California, in 1958. He began playing guitar at age ten, inspired by recordings of Armstrong, Basie, Goodman, and guitarists Barney Kessel, Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, and George Van Eps. As a teenager, he was already working professionally around Los Angeles in a range of jazz settings.
In 1979 he went to Atlantic City for a summer engagement with Red Norvo, an association that continued over several years.
After moving to New York City in 1982, Alden quickly became established on the jazz scene, performing and recording with Joe Bushkin, Ruby Braff, Joe Williams, Warren Vaché, Woody Herman, Benny Carter, Flip Phillips, Mel Powell, Bud Freeman, Kenny Davern, Clark Terry, Dizzy Gillespie, George Van Eps, and others.
He has recorded extensively for Concord Jazz since the late 1980s as leader, co-leader, and sideman. In 1991 he recorded Thirteen Strings with George Van Eps, which led him to adopt the seven-string guitar in 1992.
His recordings include projects with Ken Peplowski, Frank Wess, Jimmy Bruno, and Frank Vignola, including The Concord Jazz Guitar Collective, Take Your Pick, and Full Circle, as well as solo recordings such as My Shining Hour and Guitar.
Alden performed all guitar parts for Woody Allen’s 1999 film Sweet and Lowdown and coached Sean Penn for the role of Emmet Ray. He has also appeared with Mark O’Connor’s Hot Swing, Steve Miller, Vince Gill, and Nigel Kennedy.
He has been voted “Best Emerging Talent–Guitar” in the JazzTimes critics’ poll (1990), received multiple DownBeatcritics’ poll honors for “Talent Deserving Wider Recognition,” and was named one of DownBeat’s 75 Great Guitarists of All Time in 2009.
More about Greg Ruby:
Greg Ruby was born in Toronto, spent his early years near Pittsburgh, and came of age musically in the Pacific Northwest, where, in the late 1990s, a small but fervent revival of Django Reinhardt’s music was beginning to take shape. He co-founded Hot Club Sandwich, later joined Seattle’s Pearl Django, and became a familiar presence at the West Coast festivals where a generation of players rediscovered the possibilities of acoustic swing.
Though closely associated with the Django tradition, Ruby’s work has often wandered beyond it. His recording Look Both Ways, a collection of original compositions, led Dan Hicks to call it “a soundtrack in search of a movie,” a description that captures the music’s cinematic drift between jazz, folk, and the American vernacular.
In recent years, Ruby has been drawn as much to forgotten histories as to performance itself. His Syncopated Classicproject unearthed and restored the neglected works of Seattle pianist and composer Frank D. Waldron, an important figure in the city’s early jazz scene whose music had largely slipped from the repertoire. The resulting recording was named Northwest Jazz Recording of the Year by Earshot Jazz.
That same impulse led Ruby to the music of the Argentine guitarist Oscar Alemán, who played for Josephine Baker and moved through the same Paris circles as Django Reinhardt. Ruby authored The Oscar Alemán Play-Along Songbook and later released Just Like That, a recording in homage to Alemán’s singular blend of swing and South American rhythm.
Alongside this archival work, Ruby has also explored more vernacular and cinematic idioms, including surf-tinged and beach-influenced guitar music, and has written and composed for music libraries and sync placements across film and television.
Ruby’s parallel life as a teacher and researcher has produced a body of work that blurs the line between scholarship and performance. In addition to his books on Pearl Django, Frank D. Waldron, and Oscar Alemán, he has written for Acoustic Guitar magazine and serves as Guitar Week Coordinator for the Swannanoa Gathering.
He lives in New York City, where he performs, teaches, and writes, pursuing the odd corners of the jazz tradition where forgotten stories have a way of becoming new music.