Thursday at the Melody, outlaw country quartet Stockwell Road, power-poppers The Common, politically-aware hard rockers People vs. Radio and The Idle Villians will play a benefit for the Children of Fallen Soldiers Relief Fund; $5 cover with additional donations accepted at the bar.

Also Thursday, the Pride of Indy Jazz Band, Indiana’s only LGBT jazz ensemble, will kick off Garfield Park’s Summer Series with a 7 p.m. free performance at the MacAllister Center. The band sticks close to the standards, both in instrumentation and repertoire, and will be joined by vocalist Laura Maune for the show.

Athens, Ga., low-fi indie-pop consortium Quiet Hooves will join the loop-heavy folk-rock of Grampall Jookabox and rock quartet Everything, Now! for a Friday night show at Radio Radio. Everything, Now! is working up a new album due this year on Standard, so expect streamlined new material.

Dust off that tricycle and declare your loyalty to the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine: It’s Fez-Fest Friday at the Melody. Fez-bedecked punk-rockers The Dockers headline a fest supplemented by the quite strange sitar-led lounge rock of the Playboy Psychonauts and the appropriately titled Vinyl Shrine.

Last week: Songwriters Café, Layne, blueprint

Friday’s initial instalment in the monthly Indianapolis Songwriter’s Café seemed a success on all accounts: The show was well-attended, the three singer-songwriters — Bill Price, Frank Dean and Brent Bennett — turned out inspired performances, no one tried to talk over the singers (and thus no one was thrown out), merchandise was sold and there was free food. I got there about a half-hour into the show, but things went on for a good three hours with only a short break — and one got the sense that all three guys could go on all night.

To the music: Bill Price, long-haired, with Lennon-like glasses and face and a Technicolor vest, has a clean, bright and accomplished guitar sound with intelligent, often witty lyrics. “Blue-Period Blues” refers to Picasso’s turn-of-the-century monochromatic stage in a clever tune about the relationships of artists; “Election Day” employs the familiar phrase to encompass all manner of things in which people have a choice; “In a Flying Dream” suggests some alternate histories where awful things didn’t happen against a very mellow James Taylor-style backing.

My favorite tune by Price was the psychologically insightful and fully-realized “Henry’s War,” about a WWII veteran with an over-solicitous wife who answers every question directed his way, even those about his own background that he is uniquely qualified to answer. “You can pick your battles, you cannot pick your war,” goes the chorus, and like most of Price’s tunes, the phrase works specifically in the context of the song, and more generally as a maxim. Unlike a war tune played with near-entire seriousness (John Prine’s excellent but somewhat dated Vietnam ballad “Sam Stone” comes to mind), Price’s tune was quite funny at times, but also ably turned towards more dramatic and weighty territory.

After a two-year hiatus, Frank Dean made his glorious comeback to the local stage, donning sunglasses — imparting a little bit of a mystique to his performance — a beige shirt and a grey ponytail. He also brought along a guitar and banjo, a batch of his classics and one tune that he wrote 15 years before and had never played live. Classics like “You Walked Tall,” a tribute to Johnny Cash written by Dean and eventually recorded by Cash’s old band The Tennessee Three (and featured in the film “Walk the Line”); a “Miner’s Lament” that acknowledges more than a century of exploitation of natural and human resources in Dean’s boyhood home of West Virginia; and his hilarious “Jenny Baker,” a hard-luck tale of a guy sent to jail for statutory rape, and the education in the world that follows.

Dean says he quit playing because there weren’t any good listening rooms in town. Well, Friday night, all three performers had an attentive audience that stuck around for three hours, laughed in all the right places and picked up a few CDs after the show. As Dean put it, roughly paraphrasing: I’m not used to playing before people that I don’t hate. That seems like a good change.

Brent Bennett — the third middle-aged guy with long hair on stage, maybe a bit younger than the other two — plays a bit more in a pop-country style, with hearty strums and accessible, catchy choruses. He played the one original to his upcoming blues album, “It Must Be the Blues”; the song goes by the same name, and was a simple blues tune with elegant grace notes between chord changes. His “Midnight Man” dealt with some of the same blue-collar issues that Dean explores in his work, focusing on overnight factory workers instead of Dean’s coal miners. The workers earn “solitude and an extra 40 cents an hour” in Bennett’s tune, but pay the price of losing their voice and a whole lot of other common human qualities — love, companionship, etc. — that shouldn’t be sacrificed to a factory.

The Broad Ripple Art Fair boasted three stages of live music, mostly populated by Indiana performers (although a talented ringer from Chicago, jazz vocalist Typhanie Monique, played a noontime Saturday show accompanied by Neil Alger on electric guitar). I caught a couple performances on the river stage, which hangs over the White River just north of the Indianapolis Art Center, before a mulched and wooded courtyard with few benches but near enough mats and blankets to go around. Even if the deck could use a fresh stain, the river offered a lovely, rolling and relaxing background for the performers. Not to mention that the sound was quite good, considering the difficulties of cycling in and out several performers, and keeping things at a volume that wouldn’t interfere with the rest of the fair or the other two outdoor stages.

Cynthia Layne and her band turned in another fine set of funk and R&B-inspired jazz, including several tunes from her full-length “Beautiful Soul” and a cover or two. An epic version of “Ain’t No Sunshine” boasted solos by everyone in the band: Rob Dixon, sax; Reggie Bishop, keyboards; and Kenny Phelps, on a stripped-down set that was thoroughly exploited.

Kate Lamont and blueprintmusic, another group at the top of their game, managed to load bass, cello, a couple dobros and other folk accoutrements on stage without much hassle for an hour-long set. “Bounce,” of all the originals they played, stuck in my head — its percussive and, well, bouncing vocal line creeps ever higher throughout the chorus, with a typically tasteful cello line grounding the whole thing.