By the time the trumpets enter the picture halfway through the opening track of Tenki's new EP, the listener has been enveloped by atmosphere. On top of muted drums and guitar come layers of gentle keyboards - and are those voices harmonizing with the organ? Hints of gull-like string sounds suggest the ocean.

The trumpets turn everything upside down, adding a mariachi flavor. Then the guitar gets agitated and begins to bellow over the trumpet, and the whole thing builds to a climax before eventually calming itself down.

You could say that Mark Hummel's career in the blues is rooted in ignorance. Just not his own.

A few years ago, Hummel's reviews of books about harpist Little Walter and guitar legend Mike Bloomfield were published. "The main reason I started writing," he said in a recent interview, is because so many writers "didn't seem to have a whole lot of knowledge about the music." Now the noted West Coast harmonica player in the trademark porkpie hat has broadened that desire to educate as a contributing writer to the online blues magazine BluesWax (http://www.blueswax.com), where he especially enjoys interviewing musicians whom he thinks deserve more recognition.

Chris Vallillo studied archeology in college, but when that didn't suit him professionally, he decided to give music a shot.

"I figured if I was going to starve, I was going to go ahead and try to play music and just see if I could make a living at it," he said in an interview last week.

But Vallillo's vocational choices aren't all that different: Both archeology and the study of folk music involve the excavation of artifacts to help illuminate the way people lived deep in the past. Vallillo - a singer, songwriter, guitarist, and folklorist based out of Macomb - is one of the main-stage performers at the Midwest Folk Festival this weekend in Bishop Hill, Illinois.

"I'll tell you a cute little story," began Ray Voss, president of the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Society. "There used to be an author in town, who passed away a few years ago. His name was David Collins. And he's written about 75 books - mostly for children - and he was also a teacher. Rich Johnson [the Bix society's music director] had been trying to get him to write a book about Bix, and he never wanted to do it.

"But one day in [Collins'] class, he said, 'Does anybody know who Bix Beiderbecke is?' So one kid got up and said, 'Yeah. He's the guy that's named after a run.'"

Voss then laughs, and says, in reference to 1998's Bix Beiderbecke: Jazz Age Genius, "So Dave got busy and wrote this really nice little book."

That is a cute little story.

So ...

... how many of your kids think Bix is named after a run?