Adam Rudolph

With a new album out and a heavy schedule of touring to promote it, don't look for Los Angeles' own B Sharp Quartet to play its hometown any time soon. The group opened in New York earlier this week at the well-known Greenwich Village nightspot Visiones, part of a trip that takes them to several showcase clubs on the East Coast, including Blues Alley in Washington and Ryles in Boston.

When King Sunny Ade and his colorful band of players rev up their eclectic array of talking drums, Western-style percussion and pedal steel and electric guitars, the music delivers an exhilarating connection between traditional Nigerian culture and contemporary pop. The power of their juju music is so strong that occasionally, when the music and audience reach a synergistic peak, enthusiastic fans rush to the stage to place coins and bills on the players' sweating foreheads.

Butoh in the morning, butoh in the evening, butoh at supper time. . . . That's the plan for "the hours of the season," an unusual new collaboration between Japanese neo-Expressionist dancer Oguri and percussion master Adam Rudolph. The duo made The Times' best-of-the-year list in 1999, and their latest project finds them performing in three installments over a 14-hour period, presenting experimental, improvisational music and dance keyed to the dynamics of the day and the mood of the audience.

Yusef Lateef is a man who is thoroughly in touch with the pragmatic and the aesthetic aspects of his art. A multi-instrumentalist (tenor saxophone/flute/oboe) and composer whose career began in the boites and bistros of jazz, he now has moved easily (and happily) to performances, seminars and teaching at institutions of higher learning. "I stopped playing nightclubs in 1980," he said this week from his rural Massachusetts home, "and I pray I don't have to do that again.

The archives of Leonard Feather, the late Times jazz critic and author, are being donated by Feather's family to the Lionel Hampton School of Music at the University of Idaho. The archives, comprising letters, manuscripts, interview tapes, original music, books, phonograph records, CDs and other memorabilia, will be housed in the newly formed Leonard Feather Library at the Hampton School's Center for Jazz Study, according to publicist Virginia Wicks.

Jazz festival weekend in Los Angeles is going to be bigger than originally anticipated. The highlight event, of course, will be the 21st annual Playboy Jazz Festival. With a lineup that ranges from Joshua Redman, Chucho Valdes and Chick Corea to Grover Washington Jr., Ray Charles and Gerald Wilson, the festival--Playboy's final major jazz event of the 20th century--is a kind of summing-up of the event's long and eclectic musical history.

Here's the good news: Los Angeles may have more first-rate jazz musicians in residence than any other city in the world. (OK, Gothamites, with the outside exception of New York City.) And here's the bad: Very few jazz players (here or in New York) are making a living in their chosen field. Many, in fact, owe their survival to income from film, television and recording studio work, weekend weddings and parties, and an occasional tour in support of a pop singer.

What does it take to make a great jazz festival? A strong sense of place and the right programming to fill it, according to Randall Klein, who has built the San Francisco Jazz Festival into one of the most impressive events of its kind in North America. The 16th installment of the festival opens Thursday and runs for the following 11 days in locations around San Francisco.

The newly renamed Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County (a.k.a. the Music Center) again programmed a mere handful of concert dance performances; the Luckman Complex at Cal State L.A. cut back on dance; and Occidental College abandoned it entirely.

Put a dumbek with a pi'pa, toss in a suling with a ney, and what have you got? Alphabet soup? A bunch of Scrabble winners? An Abbott and Costello routine? Not even close. All the above tongue-twisting words are actually the names of only a few of the musical instruments employed by an eclectic musical ensemble called Eternal Wind.