Wadada Leo Smith

Want to hear a world-class orchestra, but don't want the headaches of driving Downtown to the Music Center? No problem. The Los Angeles Philharmonic will give a free performance March 24 at Los Angeles Mission College in Sylmar as part of its Neighborhood Concerts program. The orchestra has done Neighborhood Concerts since 1991. The events, designed to appeal to families, are the orchestra's version of a free sample, said James Ruggirello, the Philharmonic's director of educational programs.

With the growing number of jazz-oriented Christmas recordings available this year, Santa might do well to check out some of the following items to keep his little elves happy: A number of piano players have had Christmas in mind, generally with attractive results.

The weather is warm and the rain has stopped (at least for the time being). Now's the time to enjoy some of L.A.'s many free summer concert offerings. Tonight "Summer Nights at MOCA" returns to the Museum of Contemporary Art tonight with the Art Davis Quartet, with pianist Cedar Walton and drummer Bill Higgins. These Thursday evening events feature free museum admission, wine and beer tastings, gallery tours and art talks through Sept. 24.

There's a reason CalArts calls it the Spring Music Festival. No other name is broad enough. For the next two weeks, the Valencia campus will be filled with the sounds of Indonesian music, African music and jazz. If that seems an odd grouping, it makes more sense when you realize that CalArts used to have separate festivals for world and contemporary music. They fused them in 1991 to show that the two categories aren't mutually exclusive.

How can you label me? My mother's from Guatemala, My father's from Honduras, My grandmother's from Belize, My grandfather's from Jamaica. And it goes back so much further. I speak English and Spanish. So do you label me Hispanic? Or Black-Hispanic? Or "Blaxican"? Here's an idea: Don't label me at all. * That earnest plea is a poem by Ingrid, one of hundreds of students at Los Angeles-area schools who, over the past year, took to heart the message in the "I, Too, Am America" student arts program.

Composer, arranger and trombonist Melba Liston, who died last Friday in Los Angeles at 73, is recalled as a great person and musician by one of her first employers, bandleader Gerald Wilson. "She joined my band in November of 1944," Wilson says, "and she could do it all. She was already writing when she joined and, because I was into a different thing than she did, different kind of harmonies and all, she acquired some of those things, I'm sure." Liston was with Wilson's band until 1950.

Once upon a time, there was a spring new music festival at CalArts known far and wide for its cutting-edge quality. Luminaries from around the world showed up and attention was focused on the extra-urban cultural outpost in Valencia. What began with idealistic gusto 20 years ago, however, peaked in the mid-'80s and diminished to the point where, in the last few years, the festival has become a non-event to the off-campus audience.

The saxophonist you see playing bebop one night in a Ventura Boulevard club tours regularly with a big-name rock band. The pianist playing the thumbnail-sized performance space off Crenshaw is gearing up for a tour of Europe with his big band. The Culver City-based pianist's private-label CD is available only through mail order, but it contains one gem of a Joe Henderson solo. Welcome to the "local" Los Angeles jazz scene.

A sane New Year's Eve left Los Angeles a laughingstock among manic millennial revelers, and concert life here was quiet as well. But a night without silliness hardly means the party is over for the city of the future. The first 10 days of the new year have been a musical celebration in Southern California.

At any given instant, someone somewhere is improvising music. It's what musicians do, what they have always done, and what they will always do. It seems so commonplace an activity as to hardly warrant remark. But at one of those occasions when music was being improvised, an astounding concert in the Roy O.