Zeppelin, Glasper, and an '80s Guitar Hero: Your Aug 14–16 Weekend
After the stadium-sized spectacle of festival season, this is the weekend the circuit reminds you why the mid-sized rooms are the real backbone of Cincinnati music. August 14 through 16 is a spread of tributes, legends, hometown showcases, and one genuinely great soul headliner — and most of it happens within a short drive of each other. Let's walk it.
We have to start the night before, because it's too good to skip: Thursday, August 13, Robert Glasper plays Ludlow Garage. If you can swing a school-night jazz pilgrimage, do it. Glasper is one of the most quietly influential musicians alive — the connective tissue between modern jazz, hip-hop, and R&B — and Ludlow's roughly 500-seat room, born as an auto body shop and now one of the best-sounding seated spaces in town, is exactly where you want to hear him work.
Then the weekend proper. Friday, August 14 brings Aldo Nova to Ludlow Garage — yes, "Fantasy," yes, the guy in the leopard-print jumpsuit on the album cover, delivering the kind of '80s arena-rock catalog that plays beautifully in a room this size. It's a nostalgia trip with actual chops behind it.
Saturday, August 15 splits your loyalties in the best way. At Ludlow Garage, Kashmir — the Led Zeppelin tribute — does the near-impossible and makes a seated theater feel like a full-blown Zeppelin bootleg. Meanwhile, over in Over-the-Rhine, the Woodward Theater hosts Belt Fest, the kind of local showcase that's the whole reason a restored 500-cap theater matters to a city. One's a faithful resurrection of rock's heaviest catalog; the other's a snapshot of what Cincinnati is making right now. You genuinely can't lose, though you may have to choose.
Sunday, August 16 is the sleeper standout of the weekend, and it, too, forces a hard decision. At Bogart's, PJ Morton headlines — the Grammy-winning New Orleans soul man and Maroon 5 keyboardist whose solo work is some of the warmest R&B being made today. A voice like that in a room like Bogart's is a Sunday well spent. But across the river at the Southgate House Revival, the Sanctuary hosts The Early November with Footballhead — an emo-leaning bill in a church-turned-venue, which is either deeply ironic or perfectly fitting depending on your relationship with your teenage years. Both are the right answer for different people.
Add it up and this weekend is a clinic in what makes Cincinnati's room-to-room circuit special: an '80s guitar hero and a Zeppelin séance and a genre-defining jazz mind all cycling through one Ludlow Avenue address inside four nights, plus a homegrown festival and a soul headliner and an emo revival scattered across OTR and Newport. No stadium required.
A couple of logistics: the Ludlow Garage shows are seated, so grab tickets rather than gambling on the door, and if you're bouncing between Bogart's in Clifton and the Southgate House in Newport on Sunday, build in the drive time — the river's easy to cross but the parking isn't always. Belt Fest at the Woodward is your best bet if you want to stay in one neighborhood and let OTR do the walking for you.
Festival season gets the headlines. But weekends like this — Glasper on a Thursday, Zeppelin on a Saturday, PJ Morton to close it out — are the ones that prove Cincinnati's music economy runs 52 weeks a year. Pick your rooms. See you in a couple of them.
Sources: Cincinnati Concerts — August; Southgate House Revival Calendar; Ludlow Garage on JamBase