Jazz Beat -- Dan Faehnle Knows How To Tell A Story With Guitar

So much jazz improvisation is an episodic series of scales or virtuoso licks that it's always a pleasure to hear a young player who knows that the old masters always told a story, even when they were showing off.

Portland guitarist Dan Faehnle's shapely, intelligent phrases spill from his guitar like the lines of a really good story. I first heard this 33-year-old, Ohio-born musician at Wild Ginger playing with bassist Chuck Israels, who had been raving about the guitarist for some time. He wasn't exaggerating. Faehnle has a warm, old-fashioned bebop jazz guitar sound - like Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Jim Hall - but within that tradition makes a compelling, up-to-the-minute statement.

"In my younger days," explains Faehnle, "I had a Stratocaster and I played in rock bands, but I just hear bebop, I can't help it. I learned a lot from horn players, too. Those guitar players you mention did, too."

Since that night, Northwest listeners have been knocked out by Faehnle at Jazz Port Townsend and at the Earshot Jazz Festival. Faehnle can be heard on disc to good advantage on "Integrity" (Jazz Focus), by bassist Leroy Vinnegar, in whose quartet Faehnle performs. His own long-overdue debut, "My Ideal," is to be released in June, from Portland's Pillar Productions.

Faehnle and Portland saxophonist Warren Rand, very much in Faehnle's league, co-lead a quartet at the Seattle Art Museum at 5:30 p.m. today, with Dean Hodges (drums) and Phil Sparks (bass). Their welcome Seattle visit continues tomorrow (with Israels replacing Sparks) and Saturday at the New Orleans Restaurant.

-- During the late 1970s and early 1980s, pianist Al Hood was one of the few irreverent voices on Seattle's avant-garde scene. His "outside" approach, which took in Cecil Taylor's fury, Thelonious Monk's quirkiness and Paul Bley's pastel impressionism, attracted an important circle of young musicians to his jazz workshop at Seattle Central Community College and to his legendary evening classes at home, which continue to this day. "Not Quiet Rite," by the Al Hood Quartet, is still one of the finest albums ever recorded in Seattle.

After a stint in the Netherlands, the bearded, gnomish pianist retreated from view, plagued by tendinitis, lack of audience and a teacherly disposition that predisposed him toward instruction over performance. Over the years, however, Hood has maintained a musical relationship with Mike Davenport, a reed player and much-revered teacher of dazzling technical ability and bristling imagination. A tape of their smash January "comeback" concert at the Nordic Heritage has been released as "Friends," an excellent disc on which Hood is very much his plucky, pointillistic, witty self; Davenport crystalline, speedy and thoughtful; and the interaction between the two playful, surprising and instantaneous. Davenport and Hood celebrate the release of "Friends" at 4 p.m. Sunday at the Pig'N'Whistle (84th Street and Greenwood Avenue North).

-- Amy Denio (Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet, Tone Dogs) plays accordion as well as sings and plays her trademark saxophone in the postmodern folk-rock band Pale Nudes, 9 p.m. tomorrow at Moe's. A four-year-old U.S./European collaboration that has played festivals in Europe and Brazil, Pale Nudes features Swiss guitarist Waedi Gysi, who also performs with German baritone-saxophone jazz crazy Peter Brotzmann.

Offering a farrago of faux tangos, jigs, rumbas, waltzes and lounge jazz numbers, with ample use of drones and bistro accordion, the Nudes give off a vaguely dark yet jauntily playful cabaret mood that would easily amuse Carla Bley or Charlie Haden. Denio also proves herself an attractive and versatile vocalist in this group. Though the group originally featured avant-rock legend Chris Cutler (Henry Cow), its lineup now is: Fredi Flueckiger (drums), Michael Gerber (bass) and Jeroen Visser (sound board).

-- On April 21 at Jazz Alley, check out New York alto saxophonist Alex Graham, whose new CD is crisp as celery, as he joins ex-Seattle drummer Matthew Jorgenson. On April 23, Portland bass virtuoso David Friesen, an annual visitor to the New Orleans Restaurant, teams up with saxophonist Bud Shank there.