Jazz Aspen is a mountain-lover's rockin’ paradise. Last Labor Day weekend, Sheryl Crow and Steve Miller, among others, did the honors. The Little Nell welcomes out-of-towners, who enjoy everything from horseback riding to river rafting.

The rockers are rainmakers in Aspen. Along with the silver miners who first came over Independence Pass in 1879 to what was then known at Ute City—and later the athletes, movie stars, millionaires, and “Aspen idea” devotees of mind, body, and spirit headed for the Aspen Institute think tank—musicians have helped make this Colorado mountain town the epitome of Western cool. There’s Jimmy Buffett (a longtime buddy of longtime Aspenite Jack Nicholson), Glenn Frey (who reportedly still owns an apartment on Hopkins), Don Henley (who came and went), Ringo Starr (who owns a house down-valley), and John Oates (of Hall and Oates, a Woody Creek resident). Besides them, there’s Jeff Horowitz, who started producing the Jazz Aspen Snowmass festival each Labor Day weekend and top-loading it with the likes of Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and Neil Young.

Which is how it has come to pass that on any given Labor Day weekend, when Jazz Aspen kicks off its annual rock music series, there are a handful of things you can count on. The busiest summer weekend of the year in Aspen, population just 6,500 but with a big reputation for its mountain setting, glistening rivers, and Victorian architecture. Cornflower blue skies made more dramatic by gray clouds scudding through. Aspen leaves going golden, their flickering punctuating summer’s passing here at 7,900 feet in the Rockies. And the sky is probably going to crack open sometime during the weekend, adding its own booming thunder to the guitar crescendos, while dusting snow onto the mountain peaks. All in all, Labor Day weekend in Aspen is a time and a place so drop-dead gorgeous that, as Country rocker Lucinda Williams noticed last year, “It’s so beautiful, it’s almost too beautiful. It’s overwhelmingly beautiful. I almost can’t stand it.”

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