Live-music venues worth the trip in Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Harvard Square folk room descended from Club 47 and run as a nonprofit since 1994, a listening room that books live music seven nights a week and stages its own Campfire Festival on Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends.

The 575-capacity basement room of the Central Square restaurant-and-club complex, the Middle East’s main stage and the room where decades of touring and local bills have played to a packed floor.

A 220-seat jazz club on the third floor of the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square, open since 1985, where national jazz headliners play.

A Harvard Square rock club run by AEG Presents and Bowery Boston, the room where club-level national tours stop when they play Cambridge, with the 52 Church bar attached.

A red-lit subterranean club on Mass Ave north of Harvard Square, a 21-plus room with tables close to the stage and a five-night-a-week calendar of local and touring acts.

The tiny Mass Ave bar Toad, paired with the family-run Irish pub McCarthy’s next door, with sessions every evening at seven in the pub and bands of every style on Toad’s small stage.

The 194-capacity room above the Middle East’s restaurant in Central Square, the complex’s small stage where new local bands and club-level touring acts share the calendar.

The Middle East’s 350-capacity standalone GA room a block away on Brookline Street, home to the complex’s shared box office and the stage that takes the touring bills too loud or too big for the Upstairs.

A Central Square dive open since 1938 with a 140-capacity street-level lounge for folk, jazz and cover bands and a 100-person basement, the Cantab Underground, for hardcore, punk and experimental indie.

An Inman Square storefront where the city’s players work in close quarters, a room that calls itself Boston’s home for avant-garde music and art and was named one of All About Jazz’s Top 100 jazz venues in the world.

A narrow Irish pub on Mass Ave between Central and Harvard squares, a Cambridge fixture since 1969 that puts local bands in the front window six nights a week plus weekend afternoon sets.