This Sunday, local musicians and the fans who love them will be getting gussied up for the 13th Cincinnati Entertainment Awards honoring local musicians. The CEAs will be presented at a 7 p.m. ceremony at Covington's Madison Theater, a first for the event, and feature live performances from six nominated acts.  

Get all the details about Sunday night's CEA show, performers, tickets and special surprises as well as the scoop on the wonderful people who helped to make the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards possible.  

The 2009 Cincinnati Entertainment Awards for Music will be handed out Sunday, Nov. 22 at the Madison Theater in Covington. Live performances include The Lions Rampant, Magnolia Mountain, You You're Awesome, II Juicy, Small Time Crooks and Brian Olive. Tickets are $15 in advance and $18 at the door.  

Local musicians and the fans who love them will be getting gussied up for the 13th annual Cincinnati Entertainment Awards for Music Sunday night at Covington's Madison Theater. Even if you disdain the concept of award shows, the CEAs are always one of the best parties of the year and totally down to earth. The afterparty ranks up there too — buy a ticket and get into the post-ceremony shindig at The Mad Hatter, where The Fairmount Girls will hand out their Fashion Trashie Awards.  

The historical marker proposed for the former site of Herzog Studios downtown has been approved. Thanks to the hard work of the Cincinnati USA Music Heritage Foundation, the marker will be installed at the site (where Hank Williams recorded trademark tunes like "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry") on Sunday, Nov. 22, the day of the Cincinnati Entertainment Awards.  

You could stand in a check-out line at a grocery story in northwestern Cincinnati behind Joe McDonough and never detect that the guy unloading his cart before you is a playwright whose scripts have been enjoyed by audiences at theaters all over town and beyond. In fact, the self-effacing man who is disinclined to talk about himself at length has been writing plays since 1988. This season he's accomplished something no other local writer has ever managed to do: Two of his scripts will be given their world premieres almost simultaneously by the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park and Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati.  

A dozen years after Ed Stern's arrival in Cincinnati to take over the creative reins at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, the theater company finally was recognized by the Tony Awards for fostering new plays, building a subscriber base envied by theaters in larger cities and reaching out to several hundred thousand young people annually, the audiences of the future. Stern is quick to deflect praise from himself to those he works with and to the community the Playhouse serves. But he's played a leading role in tandem with Playhouse Executive Director Buzz Ward.   

"Ain't nothing goin' on but the weather, time and old age," Big Joe Duskin is known to say. With all due respect, he's wrong. There's plenty going on for Big Joe these days. One might be tempted to call it a comeback, but in order to "come back" you have to go away, and that certainly doesn't apply to the King of Cincinnati Blues. Besides, he knew about coming back years ago.   

At the age of 14, three years before he ever sat behind a kit or held a drumstick in his hand, John Von Ohlen became a drummer. He'd already been playing classical piano for a decade and trombone for half that long when he attended a Stan Kenton concert at some forgotten ballroom in his Indianapolis hometown in 1955 and witnessed the fluid brilliance of Kenton's gifted skinsman Mel Lewis. The event transformed him.  

Forget blow-dried scenesters and self-absorbed spotlight stealers. It's original and compelling artists like H-Bomb Ferguson that halls of fame were designed to lionize for the lucky contemporaries who knew the man and for the envious generations who will only know his music. While the CEA Hall of Fame induction came posthumously, H-Bomb knew he was loved as one of Cincinnati's most outrageously colorful musical figures.