Howard Vincent Alden was born October 17, 1958, in Newport Beach, California, and grew up in Huntington Beach, working through piano and harmonica before taking up the four-string tenor guitar and then the four-string banjo at ten. Recordings of Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Benny Goodman, and of the guitarists Barney Kessel, Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt and George Van Eps, pushed him toward a six-string, which he largely taught himself. He was working professionally around Los Angeles as a teenager, playing banjo and guitar in bands that ran from traditional to modern, and studied with Jimmy Wyble at sixteen. In 1977 and 1978 he took the jazz guitar course at the Guitar Institute of Technology in Hollywood, where his teachers were Herb Ellis, Joe Pass and Howard Roberts; he stayed on to help Roberts assemble curriculum material and eventually taught classes there himself.

The move east came in the summer of 1979, when vibraphonist Red Norvo hired him for a three-month run at Resorts International in Atlantic City, the start of several years of intermittent work with Norvo. Alden settled in New York City in 1982 for an extended engagement at the Café Carlyle with the pianist and songwriter Joe Bushkin, and was quickly absorbed into the mainstream and traditional scene: Joe Williams and Woody Herman both picked him up early, and by 1983 he was on the bandstand with Dick Hyman at Eubie Blake's hundredth-birthday concert. In 1985 he and the trombonist Dan Barrett formed the Alden-Barrett Quintet, a swing-idiom band with Chuck Wilson on alto and clarinet that recorded for Concord and, a decade later, for Arbors. Alongside it he built standing partnerships with Ruby Braff, Kenny Davern, Warren Vaché and the bassist Jack Lesberg, and made his first records as a leader: the banjo-ensemble LP Early Indications, cut when he was barely a teenager, and Swinging Into Prominence for Famous Door in 1988, whose sleeve announced it as his debut.

The decisive encounter came in 1991, when Concord president Carl Jefferson put him in a studio in Hayward, California with George Van Eps, the man who had invented the seven-string jazz guitar in the 1930s and was then in his eighties. 13 Strings was the first of four albums the two made together, running through Hand-Crafted Swing (1992), the unaccompanied duo record Seven and Seven (1993) and Keepin' Time (1996). Alden switched to the seven-string himself in 1992 and has played it since, on custom instruments built by Bob Benedetto. The Concord catalog he assembled across those years is the core of his leader work: trio dates with Mel Lewis and later Alan Dawson, Snowy Morning Blues (1990) with Monty Alexander guesting, an all-Bill Evans programme called Your Story (1994) with Frank Wess on flute and tenor, the wide-ranging Take Your Pick (1997) with Renee Rosnes and Lew Tabackin, and three duo and trio records with the clarinetist Ken Peplowski beginning with a 1992 concert in Concord's Maybeck Recital Hall series.

He reached a much wider audience through film. For Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Alden recorded every guitar solo attributed on screen to Emmet Ray, the fictional 1930s virtuoso played by Sean Penn, and coached Penn to mime the playing convincingly enough that Penn was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Dick Hyman arranged and conducted the score; Bucky Pizzarelli, the other great seven-string player of the era, sat behind Alden on rhythm guitar, and the two later made a seven-string duo album, In a Mellow Tone (2003). The Django association stuck: Alden built touring programmes around it, led a group billed as the Howard Alden Gypsy Project, and in November 2009 recorded I Remember Django for Arbors Records, a drummerless date with the guitarist Matt Munisteri and bassist Jon Burr, with Warren Vaché on cornet and the clarinetist Anat Cohen on five of its thirteen tracks.

Since the mid-2000s his work has spread out from the Concord mainstream. He was guitarist and musical director of the all-star band that toured fifty American cities for the Newport Jazz Festival's fiftieth anniversary in 2004, and spent the 2005-2006 season touring with Mark O'Connor's Hot Swing. Three records for the small Los Angeles label K2B2, produced by the bassist and cellist Buell Neidlinger, took him well outside the swing repertoire: Solo Guitar (2014), voted one of The New York City Jazz Record's albums of the year, and The Happenings (2017), nine Herbie Nichols compositions scored for seven-string guitar, cello and Marty Krystall's reeds. Heavy Artillery (2013), a two-guitar meeting with the Chicago player Andy Brown, was named by DownBeat among the best jazz albums of 2014. Alden married the dancer and costume designer Diane Garcia in 2015 and has since been based in the American southwest, where he returned to the tenor banjo he started on with The Great Banjo Summit. He has also been sought out from outside jazz, by the violinist Nigel Kennedy for recordings and concerts from 2018 and by Steve Miller for studio work and live dates.

Alden was voted Best Emerging Guitar Talent in the first JazzTimes critics' poll in 1990 and Talent Deserving Wider Recognition in the DownBeat critics' poll in 1992, 1993, 1995 and 1996. The American Guitar Museum named him Guitar Player of the Year in 2003, and DownBeat placed him among its 75 great guitarists in 2008.

Alden is a swing and mainstream player who plays chord-melody, not single-line bebop with chords behind it: the seven-string's low A string lets him carry a bass line, an inner voice and a melody at once, which is why the unaccompanied and duo settings that dominate his catalog work at all. Van Eps was the model for that approach and Barney Kessel, Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt for the vocabulary, and the debt is explicit enough that Alden has recorded tribute programmes to Reinhardt and put two Kessel tunes on I Remember Django. Against that traditionalism sits a repertoire much wider than the swing-revival label suggests: Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans on his Concord trio dates, an entire Herbie Nichols record in his fifties, and a parallel life on tenor banjo in the traditional-jazz world that most guitarists of his generation abandoned. The critical reception has been consistent since he was young. Owen Cordle wrote in JazzTimes that he might be the best of his generation, George Kanzler of the Newark Star-Ledger called him the most impressive and creative member of a new generation of jazz guitarists, and DownBeat named him a talent deserving wider recognition four times in five years.