It took the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival about three years to get into the casual character it has enjoyed for the past seven. In the first year, a black and white printout distributed the day before the Grange Hall screenings announced a one-day program consisting of a collection of shorts, a few features and some ethnic food. The next year, a move to the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven eliminated the food; eating wasn’t allowed at the site, so the festival moved again.

The crowd at Che’s Lounge sang along Saturday night, as brothers Dave and Rob Myers brought a cornucopia of music and nostalgia to the underground coffee shop in the alley off Main street in Vineyard Haven.

Many of the Island’s seasoned musicians showed up at Che’s; for them, it was a step back to the 1990s and a time when the Island was home to a number of vibrant live bands that played regularly enough that audiences became fans, buying locally-produced albums and memorizing lyrics.

For a week during the holidays this winter, Michelle Jasny left the Island for a camp in the Catskills. Armed with her accordion, she joined some 300 people at KlezKamp, a weeklong retreat for klezmer musicians. Though she’d been playing for nearly a year, and also has a background in piano and guitar, Ms. Jasny was blown away by the intensity of the repertoire, and the music. “Some of this is very fast,” she said of the traditional Yiddish music. “We were playing like nine, 10 hours a day, so it was very intense.”