When most guests sit down to a dinner at Beetlebung Farm in Chilmark, they usually glance at the menu and then set it down again, absentmindedly imprinting it with grease and wine stains. But the more discerning will notice that the seemingly disposable item is actually a work of art — the design is innovative, the words have been selected for sound and form, and the ink has been elegantly fused with the paper.

Jazz Great Plays the Tabernacle

Wynton Marsalis is, well, Wynton Marsalis, one of the premier jazz trumpeters of our time. Mr. Marsalis is also a composer, teacher, music educator and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York city. He has been awarded nine Grammys and one of his jazz recordings won the Pulitzer Prize for music.

Dr. Kenneth Alleyne, 46, and his wife, Dr. Shaun Biggers-Alleyne, love jazz. They also love Martha’s Vineyard. So they began brainstorming a way to combine these seemingly disparate passions. The result was Jazz on the Vineyard, a daylong jazz festival now in its second year, which will be held tomorrow, August 18, at Featherstone Center for the Arts in Oak Bluffs.

Excerpted from Bountiful: A History of the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society and the Livestock Show and Fair, by Susan Klein, with photographs by Alan Brigish (Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society, 2012).

This excerpt is taken from chapter 9 which tells the story of the midway and how it came to play an integral part of the annual Island tradition.

“My favorite was the Scrambler! It was really fun!”

— Dylan Biggs, 7 years of age