Jazz at the Troc

When businessman Dick Gibson and his wife Maddie moved to Denver in 1963, he found it lacked the jazz music he loved. That year, over the Labor Day weekend, he gathered a group of musicians at Aspen’s Hotel Jerome and hosted his first jazz party. The event moved the following year to another ski town, in the Casino Vail nightclub. Eventually he brought it to Denver and Colorado Springs, where “Dick Gibson’s Jazz Party” ran for some 30 years.

In 1966, nine jazz all-stars performed at Elitch Gardens’ legendary Trocadero Ballroom, which had opened in 1917 and become “the summer home of America’s big bands.” Collectors snapped up a recording of that performance released on vinyl, titled Jazz at the Troc! by 9 Greats of Jazz. In the next three years, new records were issued by the augmented 10 Greats of Jazz. Gibson dubbed these men “The World’s Greatest Jazz Band,” and the act toured until 1978 with a revolving cast.

The players were all alumni of well-known swing bands led by Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and others. Notable performers included trumpeter Yank Lawson, Bud Freeman on tenor sax and Billy Butterfield on cornet. Three members—Morey Feld (drums), Peanuts Hucko (clarinet) and Ralph Sutton (piano)—made Colorado their home; Hucko established a quintet that at times included Feld and Sutton. He opened Peanuts Hucko’s Navarre, a club and restaurant at 1727 Tremont Place in a building dating from 1879 (and today houses the American Museum of Western Art).