“Listen Local” might be the theme of the evening on Monday, July 18. That’s when Jemima James hosts her third annual Variety Show at Featherstone Center for the Arts, beginning at 6:30 p.m. The show is part of Featherstone’s Musical Mondays concert series.

It was hard to believe the witty and talented musician who played at the Yard last Tuesday night to promote the release of his first CD heard his own music on the radio for the first time that very morning. The artist, Ollie Childs, and his wife and manager, Alix, had been out driving around the Island when WMVY radio debuted a song from All in Good Time.

It was an emotional moment for the young couple, and, as Mr. Childs put it, quite “surreal.”

Recently the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society chose singer Emily Lowe as the recipient of its annual Caroline Worthington Scholarship. Emily graduated from the regional high school this past June and is the daughter of Cheryl and Erik Lowe of West Tisbury, and the granddaughter of Ernest Mendenhall and Kathy Logue.

Few people embody the statement “still waters run deep” more than Island singer-songwriter Willy Mason, equal parts thoughtful and lighthearted as he considers his musical roots and his career.

He is half done with his next album, which should be released around January. In August and September, he will be playing festivals in the United Kingdom.

Drumbeats will echo out across the Camp Ground in Oak Bluffs on Saturday evening, and anyone drawn by them towards the open-air Tabernacle will see flashes of color in constant motion and hear the voices of the Watoto Children’s Choir, a singing group from Uganda.

Uganda is currently home to more than a million orphans who have lost their parents to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. About 20 of them will be performing on the Vineyard at the end of the choir’s six-month tour of the United States.

Paul Barrere is laughing. It’s 9:30 in the morning, after a show in the Poconos, and the saucy, funky guitar player is basking in the afterglow of another night being a catalyst in one of America’s longest running musical hybrids. While Little Feat has never had the commercial success of Southern California contemporaries Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt or the Eagles, they have remained a secret handshake among a musictocracy that truly knows the good stuff.

Singing for the Beauty of the World

When Melanie DeMore comes to the Island she doesn’t just perform. She gets us all to perform. No, this isn’t one of those uncomfortable moments when you attend a performance and are plucked from the crowd to go center stage. Melanie spends the week before her performance hosting singing classes around the Island. And, if so moved after attending a workshop, you are invited to display your chops at her official performance.

Ken Alleyne doesn’t let rain get between him and jazz. Sitting on his beach chair, even when it meant simultaneously clutching his umbrella, Dr. Alleyne will take in the acts at the world famous Newport Jazz Festival, which goes on rain or shine. But as he and his wife began spending more of the summer on the Vineyard, he started missing the annual outdoor jazz event. So instead of tearing himself away from his home in Harthaven, Dr. Alleyne decided to bring jazz to Martha’s Vineyard.

Singer-songwriter Michele Zaccone and drummer/keyboardist J.B. Lamont of the band Tethered are tied together by a host of similarities. They were born on the same day three years apart, they are Geminis, and they have both been burned; Mr. Lamont by the music business, Ms. Zaccone by love.

For the Jim Thomas Spirituals Choir, the history is as much a part of the experience as the music. Tracing the evolution of American music through the Underground Railroad and the Middle Passage, Jim Thomas and his chorus sing a story of our cultural past.