A sonic screech sounds as Holy Shit! rips into their 12-minute set in the basement of a Riverwest punk house called Mint Mint Chocopocalypse. About 30 or 40 people huddle around the band, and once they get going it becomes hard to separate the band and the audience. The basement is lit by a single bare bulb. The singer flails wildly, his hair flying back and forth. There is a problem with the microphone and it constantly cuts out, leaving the image of a mute wild man screaming his head off. The music plays at breakneck speed, with one song instantly bleeding into the next.

In 1969, the band Deep Purple made history by performing Jon Lord’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra with The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London. Since then, Metallica has performed live with the San Francisco Symphony, KISS has collaborated with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and indie groups like Belle & Sebastian and The Decemberists have joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic on stage. Milwaukee adds a new chapter to the history of symphony-rock this summer with a series of four free concerts featuring live performances by The Gufs and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. The beloved local band and world-renowned orchestra will join forces at Boerner Botanical Gardens at 7 p.m., June 25; the Lake Michigan . . .

Rhonda Begos keeps a full schedule, typically performing several times a week, but Summerfest is her true busy season. With each successive year, the singer has secured more and more bookings at Milwaukee’s signature music festival, and this year will be her most active yet. She’ll be performing at least nine times, doing two gigs with her R&B band, Midnight Groove, and four with the kid-themed group EROCK, in addition to appearing . . .

Like a good jellyroll, the heart of jazz is the jam. The organized spontaneity and free-spirited approach to familiar material that can ignite at a jam session has always been emblematic of the music. In healthy jazz scenes, players get together regularly to improvise with one another. Milwaukee hasn’t had a regular jazz jam in years—until last November, when a weekly session debuted on Wednesday nights at Treats, 2221 N. Humboldt Ave. There had been blues jams and jam-band jams . . .

The Nashville that John Sieger experienced during the mid-’90s was just as many music lovers picture the city, a friendly haven for songwriting talent where hungry up-and-comers intermingle with established legends. During his time there, Sieger performed with Lucinda Williams and rubbed shoulders with Shelby Lynn. His friend lived next door to Emmylou Harris. Sieger, who has written songs for Dwight Yoakam and The BoDeans, had some success in Nashville—he hosted a weekly night at the city’s renowned Pub of Love—but, he explains, “I wasn’t making enough money to really say I had a career in music.”

Long as anyone remembers, the Iroquois made its way along the Milwaukee River every summer, saluted by raised drawbridges on its way to the harbor. The pleasure boat Iroquois has carried generations of sightseers onto the water during the warm months. What better entertainment for the Iroquois’ first cruise of the season than a shipboard show by the No Tan Lines Band, purveying what bandleader Michael Drake calls “island music.”

Tyler Traband’s self-released Re-issue EP is not a repackaged collection of five old tracks, but five songs rerecorded and issued for the first time in their new versions. For Traband, a pianist and prolific songwriter, the disc was an easy opportunity to showcase five old songs with his new band. “The hope was to catch the live vibe we’ve been getting,” he explains.

For many people, metal-influenced hard-rock belongs to the past. But Waukesha’s Bone Shaker is looking to bring it back. In the tradition of ’80s icons like Iron Maiden, the band has recultivated a sound that metal maniacs still crave. After two years and two releases, the band has managed to land on some big stages with the scene’s heavy hitters. Performances opening for groups such as Metal Church have put them in front of large crowds, which has helped to grow their following. Band members say that sticking to the old-school formula found in the recordings of favorites like Maiden, Priest and Dio will be their ticket to acceptance from this sometimes fickle fan base.

Pete Townshend coined the term “power pop” in the 1960s to describe The Who, but the phrase was forgotten for more than a decade. In the late ’70s, rock critics began applying the pithy phrase to Big Star, The Plimsouls, The Last—bands recovering the endangered verities of mid-’60s rock in three-minute testimonials to melody and harmony, two guitars, bass and drums. Power pop never produced another Beatles but has survived as a handy marketing label for a genre of melodic rock. When one such band, Material Issue, recorded a song called “International Pop Overthrow” in the early ’90s, they intended it as an anthem for the music they loved . . .

Milwaukee has been called a big small town, but it’s large enough for musicians in overlapping circles to know each other without actually playing together for decades. Such was the case with respected Latin jazz percussionist Luis Diaz and the funky pop jazz duo of Connie Grauer and Kim Zick, aka Mrs. Fun. “When we started jamming together once a week, we commented that we’ve never collaborated after all these years,” Grauer says. And then there was a relative newcomer to town, Cuban-born cellist Ana Ruth Bermudez