Best Radio DJ

The morning personality on the CU-Boulder station, Alisha is perky without being cloying, and she goes out of her way to give listeners new information about the tunes she spins. Special features include regular interviews with the station’s music director, Denise von Minden, that highlight the latest additions to the…

Best Band Name

Let’s be Frank: She got da stank! You can take it to the bank…

Best New Non-Fiction Book

When Newsweek correspondent Daniel Glick set out to chronicle the October 1998 fires that did $12 million in damage to Vail, he wound up writing what could be Colorado’s ultimate whodunit — albeit one still without a conclusion (the list of suspects is long, however). But in shining a light…

Best Matching Stage Attire

From navy blazers to red vests to bold Hawaiian luau-wear, Denver’s frat-rock revivalists, the Orangu-Tones, are always in complete harmony — from a fashion standpoint, that is. “Authentic” is the key adjective here: These guys wouldn’t look out of place at a 1962 sock hop. The Tones’ reliable uniformity is…

Best C&W Club

Denver’s long-lived country establishment has had its share of troubles over the past year. But despite a little scandal, some ownership troubles and battles with state liquor law-enforcement agencies, there’s a bloom on the Rose again. Thanks to new management — the place is now helmed by longtime Grizzly Rose…

Best Place to Dance the Night Away

From swing to salsa, dance crazes come and go with an almost Swiss precision. (We’re still awaiting the return of the Freddy.) At the advance of each new wave, the Mercury Cafe is ready, opening its funky doors to dancers of all persuasions. While swing and lindy hop are still…

Best Latin Club

You needn’t know how to dance when you enter Sevilla, but it helps: Five nights a week, the gorgeous, Euro-style nightclub inside the Icehouse ushers in hordes of well-dressed dance-floor denizens, who move to the cardio beat of live Latin sounds, from merengue to mambo and salsa. Even if you…

Best Hip-Hop Joint

For a theater stuck in the middle of a college town that’s about as white as the inside of a hospital toilet bowl, the Fox Theatre sure knows how to kick some flava: More than any other venue in the state, it consistently hosts fine performances by up-and-coming hip-hop talent…

Best Place to Keep It Real

It’s hard to keep it real these days in chic, overpriced LoDo, but no place keeps it real better than Jerry Krantz’s El Chapultepec jazz club, an undeniably divey institution. It’s smoky, true. And crowded, yes! But it costs only one beer to get in, and you can count on…

Best Jazz Club

The neon sign beckons you downstairs, and the soothing, softly lit room, the comfortable chairs and the consistently great jazz will keep you inside Vartan Jazz Club. This venue has welcomed the likes of trumpet legend Freddie Hubbard, hard-bop pioneer Horace Silver and the amazing Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, among…

Best After-Hours Club

Amsterdam’s owners cast an even larger net over the local club scene with the opening of Pure last year, a sort of pulsating oasis on Welton Street. But it’s Amsterdam that stands out as their most brilliant achievement. On Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, the club opens its door to dancers…

Best Dance Club

Earlier this year, the folks at Vinyl, the club that rose from the ashes after a fire gutted its interior in 2000, got smart: They invited Hardy Kalisher, the brains behind the internationally recognized Boulder club Soma, to help them brainstorm a new direction for their space. The result is…

Best Place to Make a Shag Last All Night

Every Wednesday night, The Snake Pit puts aside the dance and Gothic music that normally dominates its sound system to make way for Shag, during which Anglophiles dance to new and old music from the canon of British pop. Introduced in the spirit of the Pit’s original Brit-pop night, Quid,…

Best Mini-Marathon of Local Music

Every year, the Capitol Hill United Neighborhood-sponsored People’s Fair showcases some of the finest local artists in mediums ranging from aura photography to basket weaving. It’s the music, though, that’s of particular interest to many People — and before the nearly 100 bands converge on the fair’s myriad stages, they…

Best News for Movie Buffs

Last November, cable-TV giant Starz Encore and company chairman John J. Sie pledged $5 million cash and launched a $7 million fund drive to finance a three-screen, state-of-the-art movie theater facility in the Tivoli. The Starz Encore Film Center, scheduled to open in summer 2002, will become the permanent home…

Best Drag Wear

When the impossibly fanciful costumery creations of Howard Crabtree had to be re-created for a local production of Crabtree’s campy revue When Pigs Fly at Theatre on Broadway, costumer Lamecia Landrum was completely up to the task. While other career costumers might have been slammed by the demands of fabricating…

Best Festival Dedicated to Flower Power

Take a walk on the wild side at Crested Butte’s annual Wildflower Festival. Now about fifteen years old (in good Crested Butte fashion, the origins of the event are a little vague), this festival remains as fresh and invigorating as an alpine meadow after a summer shower. Crested Butte is…

Best Character Actress

Past seasons have seen Lori Hansen play a lewd nun (Nine), and a failed poet, chorus member and disturbed nun (Suddenly Last Summer). Last fall Hansen eschewed her twisted-sister ways and turned in a nicely controlled performance as a wronged Cherokee bride in part one of The Kentucky Cycle. As…

Best Singing Hero

Before Christopher Simmons died of an aneurysm last year, he had begun working on improving the singing skills and overall professionalism of the group he’d performed with for several seasons. According to one of his colleagues at PHAMALy (The Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actor’s League), Simmons “admonished us to prepare…

Best Friday-Night Entertainment

While some young Jews have drifted away, organizers of the regular Friday-night Shabbat Unplugged at Temple Emanuel have figured out a way to make the Song of David ring out. Featuring modern instruments and a rabbi who can riff, the monthly event has been catching on. Where once there were…

Best Concert (since June 2000)

Backed by a band that included sister Astrid and wife Pegi, Neil Young ably demonstrated that he still has the chops, the power and the appeal to keep fans coming back again and again. And again. In three consecutive sold-out appearances at Red Rocks — one of which included a…

Best Steps Taken by a Public Institution

They’re four small steps for Boulder, but four giant steps for poem-kind: The first four of fifty proposed engraved sandstone slabs were laid in a walkway at the Boulder Public Library’s south entrance last fall, featuring quotes by poets Wawatay Eninew, Rabindrath Tagore, Thomas Hornsby Ferril and Anna Akhmatova. According…