Edgar Winter shocked the rock establishment in 1972 when he strapped a keyboard to his chest and played it as the lead instrument for his instrumental hit, “Frankenstein.” The happy hard-rock icon just played the Northern Lights Theater earlier this summer when he appeared with the latest version of Ringo Starr’s All Starr Band, but when he returns tonight for an 8 p.m. concert, he’ll be headlining.

By the year 2000, rock saxophonist Steve Mackay’s profile has grown so low that music historians had written him off as dead. In 1970 Mackay had emerged as an enigma when he briefly joined Iggy Pop and The Stooges to record and tour behind their Funhouse album, but although he’s recorded sporadically in the following decades (including with Milwaukee’s Violent Femmes), it wasn’t until he joined The Stooges’ 2003 reunion that the cult figure earned a critical reappraisal (or, at the very least, an acknowledgement that he was in fact alive). It turns...

The Marquette University Golden Eagles take on Houston-Baptist tonight at a 7:30 p.m. Bradley Center game.

Hoping to create a new Milwaukee tradition, The Hardcore Comedy Show returns for a second round tonight at 9 p.m. This free show pairs five of Milwaukee’s burgeoning female stand-up comedians—grrrl comedians?—in one of the city’s least likely comedy venues, the Cactus Club’s grimy back room, long the territory of punk-rock concerts. The material is unapologetically crass, so expect an angrier, more explicit and much, much funnier version of “The Vagina Monologues.”

In a jam scene filled with prolific players, few are more ubiquitous that guitarist Warren Haynes. He started his career in the late ’80s as the fresh blood in a reunited Allman Brothers Band, and expanded his profile with his more overtly jammy southern-rock group, Gov’t Mule, before making his presence further felt on the Bonnaroo circuit with his many solo performances and his long tenure with Phil Lesh and Friends. This year Haynes has focused most of his energies on Gov’t Mule, which plays an 8 p.m. show at the Rave tonight with their newly...

Pezzettino, who plays the Stonefly Brewery tonight at 10 p.m., is the musical outlet for Milwaukee singer, accordionist and pianist Margaret Stutt. She's new to songwriting but not to playing, learning piano by ear at age 5, with classical lessons to follow. She picked up accordion within the last year, which freed her to begin writing. Her debut, Because I Have No Control is moody and minimal, with songs that are fresh and intriguing, especially when she relies on the grave, medieval carnival sound of the accordion.

For the tween-aged girl in us all, the Bradley Center hosts the 2008 Tour of Gymnastics Superstars tonight at 7 p.m., which pairs young athletes with the music of “Disney Girlz Rock 2.” World champion Shawn Johnson and nine-time world medalist Nastia Liukin are the most accomplished of the dozen-plus names of the bill, which also features hunky male competitors like Paul Hamm and Blaine Wilson, as well as live performances from KSM and Jordan...

During World War II Milwaukeean Martin Daly had to go to great lengths to keep his four enlisted sons aware of what was happening back home. He toiled away on a manual typewriter, carbon sheets and some of the thinnest paper available, writing an exhaustive newsletter for his sons. He wrote some eight pages every week for three years, detailing life in Milwaukee and named the weekly bulletin The Daly News. The war eventually ended, but the newsletters...

Frustrated by the lack of political content in the songs of Audioslave, Tom Morello’s post-Rage Against the Machine band, Morello picked up a guitar and began to write his own activist songs. As The Nightwatchman, a stage persona he created so he could debut these new songs anonymously, the singer-songwriter has released two albums of stark, Bruce Springsteen/Woody Guthrie-styled populism. Tonight Morello/The Nightwatchman...

Though they were better associated with the punk-rock scene at the time, in 1980 The Blasters released a song that would become a roots-rock rally cry, “American Music.” “We got the Louisiana boogie and the Delta blues,” they sang. “We got country swing and rockabilly, too/ We got jazz, country-western and Chicago blues/ It’s the greatest music that you ever knew/ It’s American music/ It’s the greatest sound, right from the U.S.A.” A quarter-century...