Live music in New Orleans this week

New Orleans doesn't have a music scene so much as a music metabolism — live music is how the city breathes, seven nights a week. Frenchmen Street in the Marigny is the densest few blocks of live music in America: The Spotted Cat and Snug Harbor for traditional and modern jazz, d.b.a. for brass and roots, Blue Nile and The Maison stacking multiple sets a night. A few blocks over in the French Quarter, Preservation Hall has run all-acoustic traditional jazz sets since 1961, with House of Blues and the Toulouse Theatre carrying the touring calendar nearby.

Uptown and Carrollton hold the city's funk cathedrals: Tipitina's — founded in 1977 as a home base for Professor Longhair — is still the room every New Orleans musician treats as sacred ground, and the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street has hosted brass-band nights for decades. Le Bon Temps Roulé and Carrollton Station keep the neighborhood-bar end of Uptown alive. Downriver, the Bywater and St. Claude corridor is the scrappy side of the scene — Saturn Bar's time-capsule interior, Vaughan's Lounge (made famous by Kermit Ruffins' Thursday nights), Siberia's punk-meets-brass bookings, Poor Boys, and The Domino. Mid-City adds Chickie Wah Wah's songwriter-and-blues room and the open-air Broadside.

The CBD and Warehouse District carry the touring tier: The Fillmore, Joy Theater, Civic Theatre, Orpheum, and Saenger for theaters; The Howlin' Wolf, Republic, and Three Keys for clubs; Smoothie King Center when the act needs an arena. What you hear is the point — brass band, second-line funk, traditional and modern jazz, bounce, swamp blues, and zydeco cross-pollinate nightly, and half the best shows are door-charge rooms that never touch a national ticketing platform. The New Orleans feed on Rager tracks it all in one list, from Frenchmen Street sets to Fillmore headliners.