The folks behind Seventh Circle Music Collective have long fostered Denver's DIY scene in their west Denver garage, record store, practice room and multi-use art space. Since every show is all-ages, Seventh Circle is an ideal spot for younger fans to hear music, and younger musicians to find a stage to play. Although the small venue hasn't been booking live shows during the pandemic, it's been hosting livestreams while it bides its time before getting back to business.

During the pandemic, the Salt Lick Denver Music Collective opened a new venue called The Pond in the basement of a house in Denver. The group has been broadcasting concerts from there called Songs From the Pond, by indie-rock bands and other local acts. Eventually, Salt Lick plans to open the space — which is painted with a mural of a glow-in-the-dark frog, beans and squash, and decorated with a mannequin and other ephemera — for tiny in-person shows, and to host larger outdoor shows behind the venue.

Not long after 3 Kings Tavern, a legendary rock club, closed after fourteen years on Broadway, Scott Happel and Peter Ore, two of the owners of the Oriental Theater, took over the space and turned it into HQ. While the club will gradually ramp up its live-music offerings, including punk acts like Reno Divorce and Agent Orange, in the coming months, HQ has already been hosting regular karaoke, burlesque and goth nights.

In an era filled with grief and rage, musicians Kayla Marque, Sur Ellz and Crl Crrll joined together in a new supergroup, the Grand Alliance, with the goal of offering the world a vision of a better future through song. Spanning Black musical genres from disco and R&B to hip-hop and funk, this forward-thinking trio crafted a debut album that is at once comforting, dance-inspiring and daring enough to offer hope. Rooted in Afrofuturism, their collaboration takes the masterful musicianship of these three artists and multiplies it by infinity — with swagger.

If there's anyone in the state who deserves to be on the esteemed jazz label Blue Note Records, it's cornetist Ron Miles. Rainbow Sign, mostly written when Miles's father was near the end of his life, marks his first recording for Blue Note, and it tops the aesthetic charts with Miles's heartfelt compositions and moving and intuitive interplay with guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Brian Blade (both of whom have made other albums with Miles), as well as bassist Thomas Morgan and pianist Jason Moran.