Trading his fratty trucker hat in for a more classically suave fedora, and borrowing the relaxed, tropical vibe of Israel Kamakawiwo'ole’s iconic “Under The Rainbow” cover, Jason Mraz scored his biggest hit yet this year with “I’m Yours,” a fittingly breezy vehicle for the singer-songwriter’s gentle, scatting vocals. The most unapologetically poppy of Jack Johnson’s followers, Mraz plays a sold-out concert tonight at 7:30 p.m. the Eagles Ballroom, a venue he has...

After a rough summer where Hurricanes Ike and Gustav took a $10 billion toll on the country and destroyed nearly a third of its crops, Cuba was struck by another hurricane earlier this month, Paloma, which leveled hundreds more homes. Tonight Milwaukee does its part to help out its struggling sister city, the port of Nuevitas, with a 7 p.m. Benefit for Cuban Hurricane Relief concert and dance at the United Community Center, 1028 S. 9th St. Performing traditional and modern Cuban music will be Tony Baez, Ana Ruth Bermudez and the groups Rumbrava...

As the bassist and vocalist for the New Grass Revival in the ’70s and ’80s, John Cowan helped expand the scope of bluegrass music, playing heavier and flashier than the genre’s forefathers, and also dabbling in then-blasphemous covers of songs by The Beatles and Bob Marley. Of course, Cowan has plenty of company these days, thanks to the young, freewheeling “jam-grass” scene, but he was among the first to take a gamble on pairing the sounds of Bill Monroe with the pomp and energy of Led Zeppelin, honing a style of progressive...

California's Sound Tribe Sector 9 claims that instrumental music can reflect the tension of the times. In fact, the five-man collective considers its dense Eno-esque swirl of pulsing live and electronic sounds a means of "conversation" between band and listener. Peaceblaster, STS9's fourth studio album, finds band members in a dark mood that's occasionally tempered by shimmering rays of light. That new material should work extremely well...

The Milwaukee Bucks take on the New York Knicks tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Bradley Center.

Florentine Opera opens its latest season this weekend with Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, one of the world's most popular operas and one of the greatest. Puccini's music is so psychologically transparent that the listener can absorb the action by listening to the score without benefit of dialogue or visuals and with only a rudimentary knowledge of the story. Madama Butterfly weaves a constant stream of underlying leitmotifs that change rapidly, always yielding melodic riches to illuminate the character's emotional state even before the character sings...

The Saddest Music in the World director Guy Maddin pays homage to his hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba in his latest film, My Winnipeg, a pseudo-documentary that views its subject with equal parts affection and embarrassment. Through a string of wry, dreamlike images, Maddin tells the “history” of the city, embellishing with his own surreal flights of fantasy. The UWM Union Theatre screens the film this weekend, with 7 and 9 p.m. showings tonight.

Music has changed the world, and in the last century some of that music originated outside the big corporations on independent labels. Perhaps the most celebrated was Sun Records, where Elvis began, but the Memphis label was neither the first nor the last word in indies. Little labels operating at the margins of the entertainment industry helped shape the sound of blues and jazz, rock 'n' roll and rhythm 'n' blues, punk and grunge. A few indies grew into major labels, such as Atlantic and Motown, and eventually lost their identity...

Janis Ian's autobiography, Society's Child, is an interesting read about mid-20th-century New York culture, including McCarthy-style oppression and overt racism, but she really should hire a fact-checker. Although the book serves as a wide-eyed account of show business in the 1960s and '70s, it's difficult to fully believe Ian's recollections because she makes numerous errors about the music scene. Ian states that Sam the Sham headlined Shea Stadium and The Blues Project morphed into the Chicago Transit Authority. Neither is correct. Ian had two...