Go to the mobile version of this Web site.

Login | Contact Us | Site Map | Paid archives | Electronic edition | Subscription Questions | Extras

Cool moves

Jazz jumps uptown, to the 'burbs with plenty of bop to go around

Alex Neth, Rocky Mountain News

Published April 14, 2006 at midnight

Text size  

More Music

More stories »

Imagine Denver. What springs to mind?

The stock show? Absolutely. Purple mountain majesties? Of course. Football, the Denver boot, Elvis flying in for a fried peanut butter sandwich, the brown cloud over the foothills.

But jazz? The wicked, hard bop of polluted geniuses like Miles Davis and John Coltrane? Saxophone solos bouncing off the walls of tiny, smoky clubs, hepcats nodding to an evil arpeggio - those are scenes from another city. New York, perhaps, or Chicago. Denver - that's where the Broncos play, right?

It's time to re-imagine.

Jazz is on the upswing in these parts, a rebirth of the great old days in the early half of the 20th century when Artie Shaw and Charlie Parker swung at the Rossonian in Five Points, when Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady took in bop gigs on their way out of town and into history. The proof is in the numbers - as in, the growing numbers of jazz fans willing to spend their dollars on the live experience, and the numbers of establishments, new and old alike, rushing to accept them.

Jazz @ Jack's, the contemporary jazz club that had previously been hidden in the bowels of Confluence Park has moved, Jeffersons-style, on up to a deluxe new location on the third floor of the Denver Pavilions. Stalwarts like El Chapultepec and Dazzle now face competition from The Robusto Room, a hopping joint located in, of all places, a suburban mall. Crowds are packing rooms on weeknights to experience artists like Fred Hess and The Greg Harris Vibe Quintet. Local musicians are bending genres, finding that bop soul in rock, blues and bluegrass. The city's longtime jazz radio station, KUVO-FM (89.3), not only soldiers on; some think after two decades it has assumed a spot among the nation's finest. No matter how you shake it - or rattle it, even roll it - Denver is showing off its chops.

Dotsero's bold move uptown

Dave and Steve Watts, better known as the contemporary jazz duo Dotsero, have tasted success outside the city limits - and then cashed it in for a stronger foothold in their hometown.

The duo, who climbed to the top of Billboard's Contemporary Jazz chart with the album Jubilee in 1991, parlayed their smooth, professional sound into an ownership stake in Jazz @ Jack's in 1998. The spot in the Zang Building by the South Platte River may have been a bit off the beaten path, but it ensured their group a regular place to play in Denver.

While Jazz @ Jack's flourished for almost seven years, the brothers were thinking it could be bigger and better - someplace with more tables and a more visible location to draw more casual customers.

Those thoughts crystallized into actions when their lease ran out - and when the Denver Pavilions offered to bring their club into that mall's flashy fold.

"The Pavilions really knocked themselves out," Dave Watts said.

Not that they needed to. The location was everything the two had hoped for. Not only would the adjacent 16th Street Mall offer some of the best walk-by traffic in Denver, the club would be within a harmonica's bleat of several high-rises packed with potential customers, folks who had been jonesing for syncopation but didn't know where to look. Even college music majors like the Watts brothers are sometimes thankful they took a few business courses.

"We had a teacher in college tell us, if you're gonna open a shoe store, open a shoe store next to another shoe store," Dave Watts said. "Because it brings in more people because of the competition. So we're gonna be right there with Coyote Ugly, Lucky Strike, there's a lot of different diversity up there. I can go bowling on the breaks."

The newfangled Jazz @ Jack's opened last weekend and the brothers plan to continue the format that brought them this far: a combination of jazz and blues augmented with an evening of comedy. They also plan to add a regular blues night and bring in national acts such as saxophonist Eric Darius.

To their way of thinking, the move represents a sea change not just for Dotsero and Jazz @ Jack's but for the growth of jazz in Denver as a whole.

"It seemed to me like, back when we started, there were places you wanted to play," Steve Watts said, "like The Bay Wolf, and those were the only places. It was always a weekend town. A lot of the guys back then were pounding it and pounding it in order to make a big enough name to leave Denver.

"This expansion is not only going to help Dotsero and the jazz scene, it's going to help numbers of jazz musicians that we have work for now."

Bringing bop to the 'burbs

Peter Roth doesn't just love jazz. He made it his business. In his mid-20s, Roth left his office job and, along with his wife Sara, parlayed his twin passions - hard-eyed, pure jazz and fine cigars - into a new life. The two opened their first business, a cigar kiosk called Stogies & Bogeys, in the Park Meadows Mall in 2001; then, last year, the two took the mailing list and customer base they had developed and added walls and a horn section. The Robusto Room, a straight-jazz club with the new Stogies & Bogeys attached, opened in December, an oasis of urbanity in a decidedly suburban setting.

Roth doesn't subscribe to the Watts brothers' shoe store analogy. Just the opposite.

"The location was by design," Roth said of his club, nestled in a portion of the old Avalon nightclub space in the Park Meadows Shopping Center, next to the United Artists Theatre and a few chain restaurants. "A lot of people don't want to drive downtown just for one night of jazz, risk getting a DUI even though they've had only one drink. Down here, we're only three, four, five blocks away. And it's the same quality of music as you'd get at any downtown jazz club."

A recent Saturday night at The Robusto Room seemed to validate Roth's instincts. While the black-clad players in The Peter Sommer Quartet might have traveled through time from New York circa 1943, the crowd at hand was quite plainly representative of Lone Tree, 2006. Adult couples in Avalanche sweatshirts and khaki shorts shared drinking space with polished, high-heeled club regulars. A young teenage boy sat next to his guardian transfixed, wordlessly mimicking Sommer's saxophone fingering, jazzbo in training.

A group of three adolescent lads, discharged from some explosion-laden film at the theater next door, stood on the sidewalk behind the club's glass picture windows and played air guitar for what they could only hopefully assume were the amused patrons inside. Their mugging went largely unappreciated. The senses of those within were otherwise occupied.

Eric Nesbitt had been trying to find some jazz around these parts. Despite living in Highlands Ranch, the Chicago native had been trekking downtown to get his fix - until he came across The Robusto Room after a movie and found a home.

"There's not too many places out here," Nesbitt said from his catbird seat at the bar's long, central table, only a few feet from the musicians. "This place is a big bonus, having it nearby. I love the music . . . This place is gonna be my Cheers."

With the success of The Robusto Room, Roth has found license to dream, and dream big. The idea of further expansion is already percolating; another club, another suburban area, another untapped market of jazz fans uninterested in downtown crowds.

Dazzling the competition

The Capitol Hill jazz hang Dazzle has, over the past several years, built a solid reputation via consistency: consistently strong jazz, a consistently happening and diverse crowd and, of course, consistently strong cocktails.

The spit-shined young professionals lounging in the bar beneath feathered globelights are as much a part of the ambience as the handsome staffers and clever, old-school drink menus printed on used album covers. But it takes a step behind the curtain separating the dreamily-lit bar from the darkened stage area to really understand what owner Donald Rossa means to bring to town at 930 Lincoln St.

"I wanted a place where it all comes together - good food, good service, good music and art," Rossa said. "That old era of supper clubs. You grow up watching TV, you saw Lucille Ball, Ricky directing the band, that style. It's just a cool scene."

Perhaps more than any other Denver jazz club, Dazzle exemplifies the local scene's maturation. Far from the tiny, weathered environs of the famous El Chapultepec - Denver's longstanding downtown jazz haven that doesn't just resist change, it boots it out the front door - Dazzle represents a conscious effort to celebrate the music's hardcore spirit without any attendant seediness. Twice-nightly sets are tied to dinner service, in true supper club style, so hepcats and kittens can munch balsamic mustard salmon or grilled hanger steak while getting their bop on. And bop it is; Dazzle, like The Robusto Room, focuses on "pure," or straight-ahead hard jazz, experimental, intellectual and unpredictable.

Given his establishment's idiosyncratic formula, Rossa doesn't feel particularly concerned about the advancing competition. With the exception of a recent remodeling - "polishing the apple," as he said - he plans to steer the ship as before, offering grownups a nice dinner and intricate performances courtesy of pros like Hugh Ragin, Renee Marie and Ron Miles.

Rossa also takes advantage of the plentiful talent available in nearby high schools and colleges.

"One thing is, each of the (local) universities has a tremendous jazz school," Rossa said, "with great students, great instructors, people like Lynn Baker and Eric Gunnison. All these terrific people didn't have anywhere to play."

Rossa gave them such a place. That same spirit of giving includes providing financial support for the Colorado Conservatory of Jazz Arts and The Denver School of the Arts, in service to a European sense of artistic integration within a community. He hopes to express that sense through Dazzle, a holistic cultural contribution wrapped in alto saxophone and snare drum.

"It becomes more of a concept of community - people coming together," he said. "I provide the canvas, you provide the art. I believe that's my responsibility. And jazz happens to be a part of it."

Those within the scene appreciate the new venues and the fans who fill them, but it's not as if all this jazz has leaped, fully-formed, from a desolate musical landscape. After all, Denver has a history of producing fine jazzbos - Dianne Reeves and Paul Taylor, to pick two. Our state hosts several well-known festivals, from Telluride to the Sangre de Cristos to City Park, and a number of other venues, like the Mount Vernon Country Club and Boulder Theater, have long sponsored regular jazz series. And for 20 years we've been able to get our jazz fix on the radio thanks to KUVO, the city's unrelenting voice for playing, promoting and generally advocating the music.

Local jazz bassist - and former mayoral mouthpiece for Wellington Webb - Andrew Hudson considers it without peer.

"It is one of this community's greatest treasures," Hudson said. "I travel all over the country, and the first thing I do in my rental car is find a jazz station. I have yet to find one that ever compares."

To Hudson's mind, the notion of a bop-deprived Denver is a mirage.

"I tell you," he said. "There are very few places that support jazz like Denver."

All that jazz

Eleven other spots to hear the music

• Trios Enoteca

1730 Wynkoop St., 303-293-2887

Eclectic jazz Mondays-Saturdays.

• Herb's Jazz & Blues

2057 Larimer St. 303-299-9555

Jazz nights Mondays and Tuesdays

• El Chapultepec

1962 Market St. 303-295-9126

Hard jazz every night of the week

• Dulcinea's 100th Monkey

717 E. Colfax Ave., 303-832-3601

Acid jazz and DJ sets nightly

• Fourth Story at Tattered Cover Cherry Creek

2955 E. First Ave., 303-322-7727

Jazz sets during Sunday brunch and Monday evenings

• Sambuca Jazz Cafe

1320 15th St. 303-629-5299

Eclectic jazz, usually Sunday-Thursday

• The Boulder Broker Inn

555 30th St., Boulder. 303-444-3330

Pure bop with faculty members from the University of Colorado Jazz department every Friday evening

• The D Note 7519 Grandview Ave., Olde Town Arvada, 303-463-6683

Jazz on Tuesdays with the Amy Kay Combo and occasional jazz bands from local schools

• The Back Room Corner of 17th and Vine. 303-399-1700

Jazz with the Dave Corbus Quartet every Friday and Saturday evening

• The Hotel Boulderado

2115 13th St., Boulder. 303-440-2880

Jazz on the Mezzanine every Wednesday evening with the Diamond Weyl Showcase

• JW Marriott Denver at Cherry Creek

150 Clayton Lane, 303-316-2700

Danny Wein impersonates Frank Sinatra on Thursdays, jazz standards on Saturday nights with Teresa Carroll and her band