By JACK SHEA

Echoes of the Roaring Twenties (think Cotton Club meets The Great Gatsby) will surface this Sunday, August 3, at the Starbuck’s Neck home of Susan and Jim Swartz when Vince Giordano and his 11-piece Nighthawks jazz band serenade at Sunday Brunch And All That Jazz, an inspired fund-raising idea from noon to 4 p.m. to benefit the YMCA.

Three questions came to mind as I headed out this past Friday to see Berklee College of Music students and faculty work their therapy magic on the Island. One, can you ever get high school kids to sit around and pay attention? Two, is there a career in music therapy? And three, can nursing home residents carry a beat?

It was Sunday afternoon, deep underground in the sub-basement studio of community radio WVVY, and they were having what one of the flustered on-air staff called “real extreme technical difficulties.”

The monitor outside the studio, an ancient Aiwa radio cassette, was not picking up any signal. Hurried phone calls were made and the suspicion was confirmed: the station was not broadcasting the program, although it was apparently going out okay to a small number of online listeners.

When jazz crooner Jerri Wells is finally coaxed up to the front of Oak Bluffs’ Offshore Ale by Eddie (Pepé Caron) Larkosh for a rendition of Do You Know What It Is to Miss New Orleans? she does not stick to the script for long. She delivers a few bars of the prescribed number then, like some sort of thief sidling past a security guard, hums her own improvised segue and ducks into the second verse of A ll Of Me, the Billie Holiday version, leaving the band to scramble after her.

The lines sprang into Jemima James’ head, complete with melody, sometime in the 1970s: “Raised in a home, his back got no bone.” The rest of the song, Billy Baloo, soon followed.

“I just liked the way it sounded,” she said, sitting in the wind outside the Scottish Bakehouse in Vineyard Haven this week. Though the story didn’t pair with reality, she found that changing the words messed with the tune. And she trusts the songs that arrive this way.

Tim Laursen, who writes the majority of the lyrics for The Billionaires, looks through his screen porch out at the woodland behind his family’s Vineyard Haven home, and tries to explain his song-writing method.

“Okay, popping into my head right now, wood,” he says, humming a tune and then seamlessly cranking out a lyric: “Must be romantic cutting wood by hand/Put down the power tools and give me back the land.”

The pencilina is like an instrument from Dr. Seuss’s The Butter Battle Book. It’s got bass and treble necks with movable bridges and open strings which can be plucked, played with a bow and manipulated with drumsticks. It is mounted with four bells: a fire bell, a doorbell, and two brass telephone ringers.

During the day Che’s Lounge is a quiet coffee shop with second-hand sofas and deep, sometimes springless armchairs situated at the back of an alley off Main street Vineyard Haven. In the summer months some of this furniture is dragged out under a canopy where a few regulars nurse lattes.

But by night it is one of the Island’s principle music venues.

The folk trio of Cindy Kallet, Ellen Epstein and Michael Cicone have emerged after a 15-year recording hiatus to release Heartwalk, a collection of original songs and folk favorites. While the three may have spent the past decade and a half on other projects, the warmth and sincerity on Heartwalk demonstrates they’ve lost none of the chemistry that earned them accolades on the New England folk circuit for their previous albums Angels in Daring (1988) and Only Human (1993).

First it was Owen Bennion’s two front teeth vs. a steel basketball pole. Then it was Matt Ungaro’s left ear vs. a moth of undetermined species.