Vineyard Sound celebrates the end of summer with a two-hour concert at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown on Saturday, August 24, at 8 p.m.

Forty years ago Dr. Karl Skoreki trained in nephrology in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. During his time there, he noticed that many members of the same family were contracting kidney disease, a condition that was poorly understood at the time. During his career Dr. Skorecki continued to study genetic predisposition to the disease. He and other researchers have since determined that the illness, which can devolve into kidney failure, disproportionately affects African Americans, who are four to five times more likely to contract the disease and to die from its effects.

Livingston Taylor concerts are many things, all of them wonderful, but most they are events that break down the barriers between performer and listener. As he said in a past interview with the Gazette, the audience is the boss.

“You need them, they don’t need you,” he admitted, giving some insight into both his humility on stage and his appreciation. He says a show should feel more like a conversation with the audience.

Friends of MVYRadio welcome singer-songwriter Laura Marling for a special Labor Day benefit concert. Ms. Marling is considered one of the most unique and celebrated folk artists working today.

The concert is on Sunday, September 1, at 7:30 p.m. at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center at the Tisbury Marketplace in Vineyard Haven.

Willy Mason is sitting on a barstool in a London pub, smoking a cigarette and considering the last decade. He takes a pull on his beer and thinks about what all the buzz — tours with Radiohead, collaborations with the Chemical Brothers and duets with KT Tunstall and Rosanne Cash — has really meant to the young bard now closing in on 30.

At Owen Park, in downtown Vineyard Haven, a little red trailer is hitched to the back of a Chilmark Spring Water van. On the side of the trailer, painted in expansive gold script, it says: The Vineyard Haven Band Est. 1868.

Frank Dunkl, owner of Chilmark Springwater with his brother and sister, serves as the band’s board president, french horn player and passionate historian.