Jazz

Bump Picasso. Forget Rococo. The Quai Branly Museum, a steel-and-glass palace on the Seine River, has news for the culture world: "Three Little Bops" is art. The Looney Tunes cartoon from 1957 retells the Three Little Pigs as a jazz fable with music by trumpeter Shorty Rogers, a luminary of the West Coast school. The Big Bad Wolf is a lousy trumpeter trying to sit in with a swinging trio of pigs. He gets the bum's rush, blows down two clubs and ends up in hell after a mishap with TNT.

After 17 years, nine studio albums and countless tours, Medeski, Martin and Wood are, in a sense, a band without a country. And they couldn't be happier. Dedicated to what keyboardist John Medeski calls "the spirit of jazz" through a fierce devotion to improvisation, the trio nevertheless has struggled to find a place within the jazz community -- despite having recorded with established players like John Scofield and signing with iconic label Blue Note in 1998.

For roughly two decades, the name "Marsalis" practically has been synonymous with jazz, thanks to the work of trumpeter Wynton and saxophonist Branford, his elder brothers. But there's another Marsalis who may be on the verge of attaining wide recognition: trombonist Delfeayo (pronounced DEL-fee-oh).

Rod Stewart, Norah Jones, Ludacris, ZZ Top, Bonnie Raitt and Brad Paisley will join New Orleans favorites such as Irma Thomas, Dr. John and Allen Toussaint as headliners for this year's New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. The festival, spanning two weekends in April and May, will feature hundreds of the city's most beloved musicians and a host of national headliners at the New Orleans Fair Grounds.

Jazz at Lincoln Center faces a major challenge as it turns 20 this year: how to lure deep-pocketed donors who don't embrace an art rooted in the blues and folk music of African American slaves. Major Wall Street firms aren't among the center's key funders. Only a handful of large companies, including Cadillac, Samsung Electronics America and Bank of America Corp.

For at least the next decade, KKJZ-FM (88.1) out of Cal State Long Beach will remain an outlet for mainstream jazz and blues, according to a new programming contract announced Tuesday. The university, which owns the station, will hand over programming duties on April 21 to Global Jazz Inc., owned by radio entrepreneur Saul Levine, who also owns country music station KKGO-FM (105.1) and classical KMZT-AM (1260).

LEN WICKS stands at a lectern inside a Santa Ana union hall and mulls what he has just heard: 22 trombones playing a bossa nova version of "Fly Me to the Moon." He chooses his words carefully. "I heard two different things going on, and neither was winning," Wicks says, his wry delivery drawing scattered laughs from the Saturday-morning gathering of the BonesWest trombone jazz band. "Let's go through the key change one more time, just because I like to hear things getting slaughtered."

The walls on the entryway of Bill Tapia's Westminster home are covered with photographs documenting a career that found him playing with such jazz greats as Charlie Barnet, Joe Pass and Barney Kessel. The photos weave a path to his studio, where a ukulele sits on a stand. Atop a varnished chest, fliers announce performances by the 99-year-old musician -- at the Torrance Cultural Arts Center last week, and at the Huntington Beach Library today.

Ariel Lanyi sits on a pillow to reach his piano and needs to stand on a chair to play the double bass. He peeks over the rims of the drum set and isn't big enough to use a full-sized violin. The piano is the 9-year-old Israeli prodigy's favorite instrument, but when he gets going at a jam session, he can't stick to just one, playing each with dexterity well beyond his years.

THE worlds of classical music and jazz have long been converging. Famous divas have crooned Tin Pan Alley standards, while innovative improvisers have filtered classical works through distinctive sensibilities -- think Duke Ellington reinterpreting Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker." But this month brings an unusual profusion of jazz-classical blends.