On record, Rodriguez has an assured, slightly too-knowing voice, pleading to a drug dealer - "Won't you bring back all those colors to my dreams" - over a wistful, wheezing musical backdrop that gives way to agitation. The song is "Sugar Man" (available for free download at LightInTheAttic.net/releases/rodriguez/sugar_man.mp3), from the album Cold Fact, and based on them, one gets an image of a street-wise documenter of the dark sides of urban society: "The ladies on my street / Aren't there for their health."

On the phone, though, he's soft-spoken, apologizing that he needs to have questions repeated because of his phone and his hearing.

That disconnect makes sense when one knows that the gulf between Cold Fact and Americans' awareness of it is nearly four decades. Rodriguez released the record in 1970, and its follow-up in 1971, but the apathy that greeted them forced him to give up on music.

"I thought we were going to hit," he said last week. "Didn't happen, though."

Born in Mississippi, veteran jazz trumpeter Art Hoyle was raised in Oklahoma in the early 1930s, and says that jazz "was just an inevitable part of the black community when I was growing up. You heard it everywhere - jazz and blues, and gospel music, of course. It was just part of everyday living."

It became a much bigger part for Hoyle, though, on his eighth birthday, when the young man received his first trumpet - a gift he'd long been longing for. "I was overjoyed," says Hoyle, recalling that before he turned eight, "My mother took graduate courses at Lexington University in Oklahoma in order to qualify to teach in that state, and I picked up a trumpet in the band room one day and played some notes.

"Everyone was astounded at what I could do," he says with a laugh, "and I enjoyed the attention, so I decided I wanted to play the trumpet."

The California-based Donkeys spent three years on their second album, Living on the Other Side, from start to release, and that combined with the quartet's warm, fluffy, unhurried music might create the impression that the band moves slowly. Some songs sound downright lazy.

"We're laid-back dudes," said keyboardist Anthony Lukens in a phone interview last week. "We try to make it sound like nothing's contrived or rushed. So I would probably take that as a compliment if something sounded, maybe, effortless would be a nicer way to say it. ... We're hardly lazy. ... We're definitely relaxed dudes. It takes us long time to get from Point A to Point B, because we're going to hang out and talk about it for a long time."

Michael J. Miles, the freelance educator, composer, and musician currently in the area as Quad City Arts' latest visiting artist, isn't blind to the common associations connected with the banjo. "The general awareness," he says, "if there is any, of the banjo sits on things like The Beverly Hillbillies or Deliverance or O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

So when introducing his musical instrument of choice to audiences, be they adults or children, Miles likes to begin with a little history.