Ten cities with world-class live music every night

Some cities schedule their music; these ten simply exude it. Walk a block in any of them on a wet Tuesday in February and you will hear something worth stopping for — a brass band, a fiddle session, a guitarist who should be famous and possibly once was. The trick everywhere is the same: skip the venue with the tout outside, follow the locals carrying instrument cases, and put cash in the tip jar. Musicians remember generous rooms, and generous rooms get the best encores.

Lower Broadway's honky-tonks stack live bands three storeys high from morning until 3am, free to enter — tipping the band is the cover charge, so carry small notes. Weekends belong to the bachelorette parties; aim for a Tuesday or Wednesday when the players outnumber the pedal taverns. For the serious stuff, book The Station Inn for bluegrass or a songwriters' round at the Bluebird Café, where Nashville's hit machine road-tests its material.

Bourbon Street is the decoy; Frenchmen Street, ten minutes' walk into the Marigny, is where the brass bands, funk outfits and jazz trios actually live, rolling from The Spotted Cat to d.b.a. until late. Preservation Hall's short acoustic sets are worth the queue — arrive forty-five minutes early, no drinks, all reverence. On Sundays, ask around about second line parades: a moving street party with a band at its head.

The self-declared live music capital of the world backs the boast with venues in petrol stations, back gardens and barbecue joints. Skip Sixth Street's rowdiest block and head for the Continental Club on South Congress — sticky floors, sixty years of history, bands most nights — or the patios of Rainey Street. Check the free listings in the Austin Chronicle; the best show of the week is often five dollars and unadvertised.

Music is Havana's operating system: son bands in every bar rotation, rumba in the courtyards, salsa orchestras that make sitting down feel rude. The essential night is Fábrica de Arte Cubano — a repurposed cooking-oil factory mixing galleries, concerts and dance floors, open Thursday to Sunday only, so plan the week around it. Casa de la Música in Miramar does the big salsa acts; the second, later set is always the one.

Temple Bar's sessions are cheerful but priced for coach parties. The real thing happens at The Cobblestone in Smithfield, a pub with a music problem where trad players gather nightly in the front corner and the drinking arranges itself around them — stand quietly, don't request Galway Girl. Whelan's on Wexford Street covers the rock and songwriter end. Weeknights beat weekends; the musicians stay later when the crowds are thinner.

Beale Street's neon canyon delivers blues seven nights a week, and B.B. King's club anchors it respectably, but the transcendent Memphis night happens off-strip. Wild Bill's, a strip-lit juke joint in a shopping parade, runs sweat-soaked soul revues at weekends — cash only, shared tables, forty-ounce beers. Do Sun Studio and Stax by day, then earn the museum tickets after dark. Sunday gospel brunch at a soul café completes the syllabus.

Flamenco was forged in Seville's Triana district, and it remains the place to hear it done in earnest rather than for the cruise ships. Skip the dinner-show packages: the intimate tablaos of Casa de la Memoria and La Casa del Flamenco seat fifty people close enough to feel the footwork, and tickets sell out days ahead in spring. Afterwards, La Carbonería pours cheap drinks around informal late sessions — free, chaotic, occasionally magnificent.

Chicago plugged the blues into an amplifier and never unplugged it. Kingston Mines and B.L.U.E.S. sit across Halsted Street from each other, trading bands deep into the small hours, while the Green Mill in Uptown — Al Capone's old local — runs jazz nightly beneath its original 1920s decor. Arrive before 9pm for a booth at the Mill, and don't talk during the sets; the bartenders enforce the silence with Chicagoan directness.

Fado is Portugal's saudade set to guitar, and Lisbon sings it nightly in the tiled taverns of Alfama and Mouraria. Skip the coach-party dinner shows: Tasca do Chico in Bairro Alto crams amateur singers, hanging scarves and total strangers into one small room most nights, while Mesa de Frades — a former chapel — does the late, candlelit, reverent version. Silence during songs is non-negotiable. Arrive by 8pm for a table, and let the vinho tinto work.

Nowhere sells cheap seats to greatness like Vienna: the State Opera releases standing-room tickets shortly before each performance for the price of a coffee, putting Puccini within impulse-buy range most nights of the season. Beyond the gilded halls, Porgy & Bess runs world-class jazz in a converted cinema, and the heurigen wine taverns on the city's edge add schrammelmusik to the grüner veltliner. Queue for standing room about eighty minutes before curtain; Viennese pensioners out-elbow the unprepared.