The jazz wizards of Dotsero feel at home playing big festivals, small clubs or obscure, out-of-the-way outdoor venues (as they will tonight when they play the Secret Garden in Colorado Springs).

But finding a place to fit in the jazz world has been more challenging.

“I feel like we’re a band without a genre right now,” sax man Stephen Watts said from his Denver home.

Since emerging as one of Colorado’s pre-eminent jazz forces in the early ’90s, Dotsero has tried to live up to its name, which means “something unique” among the Ute Indians. But record companies and radio programmers don’t want unique. They want to know what box to put you in.

And Dostero’s blend of contemporary jazz, pop, funk, R&B and rock has been not-so-accurately thrown into a box labeled “smooth jazz.”

“We don’t consider ourselves smooth jazz,” Watts said. “Some of what we do is smooth jazz, and we don’t have anything against smooth jazz, but we consider ourselves more contemporary jazz — which means it’s a little harder.”

Anybody who caught Dotsero playing with Grammy-winning flutist Dave Valentin at the Antlers Hilton in January knows what Watts is talking about. When he, David Watts, Tom Capek and Kip Kuepper get really cranking, it looks like somebody’s going to pop a vein.

They’re intense.

Watts says people often come up to him after gigs and say, “I don’t really like jazz, but I like what you guys are doing.”

Maybe that’s because Dotsero diverges from the cool, aloof jazz that often mars the genre.

“A lot of jazz players think they’re above the audience: ‘They just can’t begin to comprehend how great we are,’” he said, taking on an elitist tone. “What we wanted to do was the opposite. We decided we’re going to be the Van Halen of jazz. We want to be engaging visually as well as with our sound.”

Fans in and around Colorado Springs experienced that engaging jazz show in the early ’90s a lot more often than they do now. Dotsero used to have gigs twice a month in the Dublin House’s Dublin Downs jazz club.

“The crowd was there and the people really enjoyed it, but like everything, it seems like it’s cyclical,” Watts said.

But the drying up of the Springs market hasn’t hurt Dotsero, which is the house band at Jazz at Jacks on 16th Street in Denver and does half a dozen shows each year out of state.

details

Dotsero and Tony Exum (with barbecue and cash bar)

When: 6-9 p.m. tonight

Where: The Secret Garden, 420 S. 19th St.

Cost: $50; call 471-7870