Selwyn Birchwood's e-mail signature doesn't note that his band took the top prize in the 2013 International Blues Challenge. It doesn't say that he won the Albert King award as the Memphis event's top guitarist. Instead, it says: "Selwyn Birchwood, MBA."

And, yes, that is a Master of Business Administration degree. Suffice to say that Birchwood - also a singer and songwriter - is not your father's (or grandfather's) bluesman.

"That's always been a big part of my life is the scholastic part of it," he said in a recent phone interview. "My family has always pushed me to do schoolwork and do well in school. ... A lot of people say that you don't need school because you're playing music. I looked at it the other way: I think if you're playing music, you need it even more, because if, Lord forbid, gigs dried up and you have to get a job in a pinch, it's a lot easier to get a job if you've got a degree or a graduate degree ... . I always saw it as a challenge as well. I always wanted to see if I could do it."

So he got his undergraduate degree in business marketing, and in December earned his MBA. "I was ... kind of seeing how it can apply to my music," he said.

For its June 27 performance at the Redstone Room, the Portland Cello Project will be featuring the music of Beck (Hanson), (Dave) Brubeck, and (Johann Sebastian) Bach. Alliteration aside, the grouping of a contemporary rock artist, a jazz icon, and a Baroque composer is relatively natural for an ensemble known for aggressively omnivorous appetites.

"It really started with the Beck," said Doug Jenkins, the Portland Cello Project's artistic director, in a recent phone interview. "When we heard last August that he was going to put out an album of sheet music rather than actually recording an album, we got really excited, because it just seemed like it was right up our alley - to grab that and play with it and adapt it to our larger orchestral ensemble. And so we booked the show immediately. ... It was coming out December 7, so we booked the shows on December 13 [and] 14 - even having no idea what we were going to get. ... We got the music, and we basically camped out 24/7 to learn all 20 songs and get them all ready to go for the performances. ... They're wonderful songs. ... We recorded them right away, too, a week later, and then put out that CD.

"That was a month or two after Dave Brubeck passed away. [He actually died December 5.] We did kind of a tribute to Dave Brubeck at the same time. And Brubeck and Beck, they actually went together really well. The kind of old-timey feel of the Beck songs from the Song Reader, and of course Brubeck is just wonderful, timeless stuff. ... And then the Bach just seemed like, as a cellist, a logical thing to throw onto it."

Brubeck channeled Bach in his "Brandenburg Gate," and one instrumental piece from Song Reader has a classical vibe, Jenkins said. So "there's already this reaching among the composers who obviously had no idea what we were ever going to do with it. We can find a lot of middle ground, a lot of places to connect things together."

Several reviews of the Sumner Brothers' second studio album, I'll Be There Tomorrow, start similarly. No Depression's begins: "There's no reasonable explanation why I have not heard the Sumner Brothers before ... ."

Actually, there is a reasonable explanation. The Vancouver duo - playing Rozz-Tox on June 11 and recording a Daytrotter.com session while in the Quad Cities - has built a following in western Canada and the U.S. west coast over the past seven years; but it has never played "out east," in Brian Sumner's words. I didn't ask, but I think "out east" likely includes the Midwest.

"We're the turtle in the race, where we just kind of slowly grow every year," he said in a phone interview last week.

But I'll Be There Tomorrow is bringing a lot of new ears to the group following a self-titled studio album and two collections of home recordings. "It's just careful planning on our part," Brian said of the positive attention the 2012 release has received. The brothers have conscientiously cultivated media relationships, he said, which paid off when the record came out in September.

When John Fullbright plays at Rozz-Tox on May 30, expect a certain amount of ambivalence from the songwriter and musician.

I asked him in a recent phone interview whether he considers himself a good performer. "I think sometimes I am," he said plainly.

It's not that the 25-year-old Oklahoma native and resident doubts his chops, which earned him a Grammy nomination for his debut album, From the Ground Up. Rather, he's not particularly comfortable in front of an audience.

"I don't like getting on stage and saying the same jokes and doing the same thing and having a show," he explained. "But at the same time ... that's what people are paying for."