Jazz Busts Out of the Nightclub and Into the Ballroom : Jazz: For $200, a party in Las Vegas provides 16 hours of music. But there’s no smoking.

Those dark, crowded and smoky nightclubs where good jazz was to be heard (I think of Eddie Condon’s in Manhattan, Jazz Ltd. in Chicago, and Shelly’s Manne Hole in Los Angeles) appear to be joining the rumble seat in the arms of history.

But jazz parties, like Dick Gibson’s Labor Day weekend bash in Denver, are taking the place of the clubs to some extent. The latest, called “Jazz at the Riviera,” was held in a rented ballroom here and for the $200 party badge offered some 30 musicians playing 16 hours of jazz in four four-hour sessions between Friday night and Sunday afternoon. It was put together, like most jazz parties, as a labor of love--not profit--by Mel Fond and musician Wally Holmes.

(As a further indication of how things have changed, smoking was not allowed in the ballroom, although a bar was open and busy.)

The musicians ranged from the veterans Bob Haggart and Yank Lawson, both well into their 70s, to youngsters like guitarist Howard Alden and trombonist Dan Barrett, neither of whom is long out of his 20s.

The parties preserve the intimacy that was part of the club scene--the sense of direct communion between players and hearers. The attention paid to the music was reverential, and it was possible to chat with the players between sets.

Banu Gibson and her New Orleans Hot Jazz Orchestra did their polished and personable stuff for one set each session, pleasing a crowd heavy with Dixie traditionalists.

But the prevailing style was generally post-Dixie but pre-bop--mainstream, straight-ahead sound as emcee Chuck Niles described it. The musicians joined in shifting collaborations that gave everybody solo turns.

There were novelties, including a piano session that offered solos and duets by Johnny Varro, Dave McKenna and John Bunch, culminating in a three-piano, six-handed finale that was improvisationally ingenious but not a lasting contribution.

A five-horn front-line, with Warren Vache, Lawson, Jackie Coon, Ed Pelcer and Ray Fardella from the Gibson band blasting away, was a similarly interesting study in instant harmony, though it was not an item for the ages, either.

Yet three duets, starting with “Sentimental Journey,” with Howard Alden on amplified guitar and Marty Grosz strumming an unamplified guitar, were delicate, intricate and dazzling.

The traditional, all-hands-on-deck rousers, riding out on tunes like “Sweet Sue” and “I Found a New Baby” were predictably stirring. Yet the revelations of the whole weekend came from the solo turns, most often slow ballads, which revealed jazz at its most lyrical, improvisations at their most thoughtful and virtuosity at its most evident.

A cornet outing by Vache on “What’s New” was pensive and beautifully constructed, and so were his later flights on “Black and Blue.” Scott Hamilton, another of the younger generation of fine jazz instrumentalists, did a lovely exploration of “Stella by Starlight” that recalled the melodic fluency of his predecessors on tenor, Coleman Hawkins and the late Zoot Sims. Clarinetist Kenny Davern, whose purity of tone and control at the stratospheric end of the instrument is amazing, found new sweetness in “Sweet Lorraine.”

And so it went, enough music to fill several albums, possibly with liner notes on jazz body English, the swayings, the tappings, the furrowed brows, the clenched eyes and the semaphoring eyebrows, the looks of anguish and release as the solos fall into place.

Accenting it all were the weekend’s two bassists, Haggart and Dave Stone, and its drummers, Jake Hanna and the veteran Buzzy Drootin.

A handful of drummers--Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Louis Bellson--have found fame beyond the ranks of the jazz faithful. Others are legends within jazz--Big Sid Catlett, Jo Jones, Cozy Cole, George Wettling and Shelly Manne among them.

You’d have said that drummers need a rock-steady sense of the beat and not much else. But their styles are as varied as trumpet players. Manne was an experimenter who put dry rice on the drumhead for its sizzle effects; Jones was a master of the wire brushes. Rich drove a band like few others.

Drootin, now 69, became best-known for his years as the house drummer at Eddie Condon’s.

“I’m a listening drummer,” Drootin said during a chat Saturday morning. “A lot of drummers spent their whole careers trying to cut Buddy Rich. I never did. Maybe that’s why he liked me. He hated for another drummer to touch his stuff. But one time we were both playing at the Metropole in New York, and he said, ‘Look, if you need to move any of the drums or anything, go right ahead.’ The guys in the band couldn’t believe it.”

He was born Benjamin in Russia but moved to Boston with his clarinetist father when he was 5. As a teen-ager, already playing drums, he was the only musician among his pals, and one of them tagged him Buzzy, after a local band leader of that name. It stuck.

Drootin played his first gig, a Polish wedding, with his father when he was 16. He joined his brother Al in the house combo at the Silver Dollar Bar, playing three shows a night and dance sets for $18 a week. He tackled New York in 1940, played with Al Donahue’s big band and toured with Jess Stacy’s All- Stars, featuring Buck Clayton and singer Lee Wiley.

In Kansas City he heard a then-unknown player named Charlie Parker and they became friends. Drootin and Louis Armstrong were also close friends. One night after a gig they went home to Queens where they were both then living.

“Louis asked me to phone out for some Chinese food, so I was asking for moo goo gai pan, foo yung and some other stuff, and Louis said to his wife, ‘Hey, listen to Buzzy talk Chinese.’ ”

Drootin can do slam-bang solos with the best of them, but even these have a kind of elegance about them, being sound rather than noise, and in support of singers and soloists (Billie Holiday called him her favorite drummer) he is like a supportive friend.

“I’m a melodic drummer,” Buzzy Drootin says. “That’s my era.”

He and brother Al have a combo in Boston they call Endangered Species. “And, oh,” Buzzy says, “isn’t that the truth.”