Among the myriad other disruptions that massive snowstorms are causing on the East Coast, a Black History Month concert at the White House delineating the role music played in the civil-rights movement has been hastily bumped up a day, to Tuesday. It originally was scheduled for Wednesday.

“They’re expecting another 20 inches of snow, and the federal government probably will be shut down tomorrow,” the Grammy Museum's executive director, Robert Santelli, said Tuesday morning from Washington, D.C., where he was caught up fast-forwarding plans both for the concert with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Smokey Robinson, John Legend, Jennifer Hudson and numerous others, as well as an educational program that First Lady Michelle Obama was hosting for about 100 high school students from around the country.

“If we didn’t do it today, it probably would have been canceled,” said Santelli. A planned broadcast of the  concert Thursday on PBS stations is still in place, he said, as well as a live stream of the educational program for the benefit of students around the country starting at noon Pacific time. The telecast is being handled by veteran Grammy Awards show producer Ken Ehrlich, and the concert also will be streamed live Tuesday night on PBS' website.

Because of the schedule change, Santelli said a portion of the program will be recorded and made available at a future date for those who weren’t able to watch it live.

From Bob Dylan tackling 'Here Comes Santa Claus' to the "Avenue Q' puppets doing 'Ave Maria,' there's something for everyone.

It's become an annual ritual -- the flooding of the music market with dozens, if not hundreds, of holiday-themed titles, and this year is no exception. Plenty of artists are releasing festive recordings, and labels are hoping all that good cheer will translate to some sales uplift.

In the mix are offerings from a crystalline-voiced would-be American Idol and from a sandpaper-throated bona fide American icon. Sting does some musical time traveling and one adventurous experimentalist beams the spirit of the season into the vastness of deep space.

What follows is a look at some of the most interesting collections available right now:

David Archuleta, "Christmas From the Heart" (19/Jive): America's favorite elfin pop idol, Archie sounds every bit as spot-on key and invested with holiday reverence and good cheer as humanly possible -- and nearly as predictable. But given that "American Idol" is about meeting popular expectations rather than exceeding (much less defying) them, it's somehow comforting that within the familiar arrangements and production touches are a few intriguing touches such as the musical quotations of Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" into his version of "Angels We Have Heard on High."  * * 1/2 (Two and a half stars)


Andrea Bocelli, "My Christmas" (Decca). There's always an audience for yuletide music sung in a romantic tenor voice, and this year, Bocelli's under the tree. He's brought along several vocal partners including Natalie Cole, Mary J. Blige and Reba McEntire -- even the Muppets and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. As usual with operatic singers for whom English is a second language, Bocelli tends to succeed better with carols than with pop tunes.  * * 1/2 (Two and a half stars)

Vocalist Michael Bublé maintains his grip on the top of the pop charts, withstanding a challenge from the international phenom that is teen soap opera "The Twilight Saga." Bublé's Oprah Winfrey-endorsed "Crazy Love" sold 203,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, to once again lead the pop chart. In about 10 days of release -- "Crazy Love" was released off-cycle on a Friday rather than the typical Tuesday -- the album has racked up 350,000 sales.

How impressive is that? The hype for Mariah Carey's "Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel" began way back in June, and the superstar release has sold 250,000 copies in three full weeks of release.

Buble also fends off the much-hyped soundtrack to "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," which lands at No. 2 on the strength of 115,000 copies sold. Yet "New Moon" is likely in it for the long haul. The soundtrack to the first film sits at No. 63, having sold just under 2.3 million copies to date.

Additionally, "New Moon" won't be released in theaters until Nov. 20, and expect the soundtrack to still be in the upper echleon of the chart when the film hits theaters. Earlier this year, the soundtrack to "Hannah Montana: The Movie" opened with 146,000 copies sold and fell short of the top spot on the pop 200.

Yet the album was released two weeks in advance of the film and eventually moved into the top spot. Heading into this week, it was the third-bestselling soundtrack of 2009, tallying 1.6 million in sales thus far. Only Michael Jackson's "Number Ones" and Taylor Swift's "Fearless" have sold more in 2009. 

He ignores songs from his new album -- that's nothing new. Neither is his attempt to define himself through his changing set list.

Bob Dylan opened his three-night stand Tuesday at the Hollywood Palladium, essentially in the backyard of his Malibu residence, on the same day his latest studio album was released. How many songs did he play from the new collection for the hometown crowd? Zip. Nada. Zilch.

That's not a huge surprise given that the album happens to be “Christmas in the Heart,” his first holiday collection. Mid-October feels a little early to be dipping into the seasonal songbook -- even assuming Dylan would ever offer up "Must Be Santa," "Here Comes Santa Claus" or other chestnuts from the Christmas set in his live act.

The fact is, he's bypassed other new albums in concert before. Two decades ago he came through town just after "Oh Mercy" was released, but you never would have known it from his concert set list. The salient point being that the word "promotion" seems to be the one entry in the English language missing from his otherwise unabridged dictionary.

Instead, Dylan seems to treat the song selection at each night's performance as something of cabalistic ritual, a mystical exercise in which something transcendent might emerge from the proper sequence and combination of thoughts, sounds, notes and rhythms on a given evening.

“Christmas in the Heart” is due Oct. 13, and Dylan was still finalizing the song selection and sequencing this week, which is one reason a handful of music journalists weren’t able to hear the whole thing. 

But the Currier and Ives-ish cover image is a good clue as to what Dylan is after on this set of traditional carols and recent vintage Christmas chestnuts -- beyond the charity aspect. (All of Dylan’s royalties -- in perpetuity -- will be divvied up among three organizations that help feed the hungry: Feeding America, U.K.-based Crisis and the United Nations’ World Food Program, which made a snarky Reuters story earlier this week about an early-download arrangement between Sony Music and Citibank seem especially misguided.)

Rather than simply a tossed-off session for his kids and grandkids, Dylan seems to be offering up an astute exploration of the roots of holiday music -- Christmas records in particular -- in the same way he has returned in various albums over the years to mine pop music’s foundation in blues, folk, country and gospel.

His version of “Must Be Santa,” with David Hidalgo squeezing reindeer-quick accordion, is directly inspired by the arrangement that Texas rock-polka group Brave Combo created on its 1991 gem of a seasonal album, “It’s Christmas, Man!” Better yet, there's a video on the way, shot here in L.A. Dylan's treatment of “Here Comes Santa Claus” goes straight back to Gene Autry’s 1947 version, with a guitar solo that mirrors the original, melodically and tonally.

Autumn is a glutton's feast for pop fans, full of blockbuster albums, buzzed-about debuts, spectacular arena tours and rare small-venue performances. This year offers the usual mix of veterans aiming for another moment of impact, and young pretenders working to make a mark in an ever-widening field.

That's good news for those with eclectic tastes: no one subculture dominates right now, so the listening is best for people who are a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll -- and a little bit dance and folk and Latin, too. What follows is a look at the best bets for recorded and live music in the coming months, album release dates subject to change, of course.

Remember cassette tapes? Now, remember when your Walkman ate your favorite LL Cool J album, disembodying the string of tape from the plastic case, leaving you with one less thing to listen to and a pile of black waste? Fond memories.

Erika Simmons, an artist from St. Louis, has turned those nostalgic frustrations into beautiful homages to music legends. Intently ripping into her cassettes, Simmons, 25, molds the lump of tape into sculptures of rock stars.

In the year or so since she started the "Ghost in the Machine" project, she has made works in the shapes of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Trent Reznor, the Beatles and countless others. Her Michael Jackson artwork will be on display in a gallery at UCLA on Oct.  4 -- her first such show in the United States.

"The idea came from the idea of mind-body dualism and how your spirit lives in your body," Simmons said.

The photos of the sculptures on Flickr have drawn tens of thousands of hits each and international attention. Simmons charges between $800 and $4,000 for original cassette-tape artwork.

And she supplies her own cassettes. You can hang onto your bootleg REO Speedwagon tapes.

-- Mark Milian

Jimi Hendrix cassette tape art. Credit: Erika Simmons

John Fogerty has had his share of ups, and maybe more than his share of downs, in the music business over the last 40-plus years. But there are times he has to think, “Boy, it’s good to be me.”

Like this story that he shared with me this week about what had to be a pretty cool evening not long after the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened.  Each year following the induction ceremony, the honorees and the musicians on hand to fete them typically gather for a jam session.

"I remember one night — Bob Dylan was there. I don’t know if this was all in one night, but I’ll say it was one night. Mick Jagger was there, and Neil Young starts playing the guitar lick for ‘Satisfaction,’ but instead of the guitar part he’s playing the bass part. You know when they talk about a sprinter coming out of the blocks and within three strides he’s at full speed? Mick Jagger was in full stride in one and a half steps. He heard that riff and that wiry body of his went Boink! You know the thing he does on stage? I was like, 'Wow!'

“Springsteen’s standing right next to me; I think George Harrison was right here [pointing a few inches away]. It was amazing. We’re all playing ‘Satisfaction.’ At the end, somebody goes into ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ and I remember because I’m standing there tapping Bruce on the chest; I went, ‘How does it FEEL?’ -- We’re having such a good time -- ‘How does it FEEL?’

“At some other moment, [Living Colour guitarist] Vernon Reid starts playing ‘Purple Haze,’ and [now] I’m standing between Keith Richards and Johnny Cash. I look out and there’s June Carter and she’s just smiling like crazy. Johnny leans down and whispers to me and says, ‘Well. . . .’ " Fogerty recalls, mustering his best impression of Cash’s deep, quivering voice, “I  think I met my match!”

“If you know Johnny Cash, you know he knows all about ‘Purple Haze,’ because he’s plugged into everything. . . . He’s the guy who loved Bob Dylan long before anybody else knew who he was.  But that was a magical time on that stage.” That was 1992, when Cash was inducted.

Fogerty, with Creedence Clearwater Revival, also shared a memorable bill with Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and all the rest who played at Woodstock 40 years ago this month.

That anniversary has been hard to miss, but some Southern Californians may also recall that a couple of  weeks after Woodstock, Creedence was on stage Aug. 29 at the Forum in Inglewood, at a show that also featured Booker T. & the MG’s and ‘50s rocker Wilbert Harrison.

"That was a great bill, wasn't it?" he said when I reminded him of the show, which I'll never forget because it was the first rock concert I ever attended. I decided to shell out the big bucks for loge seats rather than settling for nosebleed territory in the colonnade section. I still have the ticket stub, which offers a reminder of how much things have changed over those four decades.

The cost for my loge seat? $5.75, including 25 cents city tax.

I returned to the Forum a couple months later to see the Moody Blues, but I must have been watching my budget, because I settled for the colonnade on that one.  That one set me back $3.75.

-- Randy Lewis

The official announcement of Bob Dylan's Christmas album, "Christmas in the Heart," included a list of some of the songs the bard will tackle. So far, we know only a handful of the tracks on the charity-benefiting album, but they're all pretty standard, predictable fare.

That doesn't, of course, mean Dylan's interpretation will be; simply an acknowledgment that the initial crop of tunes don't dig too deep in the Christmas canon.

As of now, we have "Here Comes Santa Claus,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Little Drummer Boy” and “Must Be Santa.” That's all well and good, but how about a few that aren't already residing in most families' Christmas play lists?

Former Times critic Robert Hilburn already Tweeted a request, noting that he's rooting for "Blue Christmas." Nice, but a definitive version of that choice already exists from Elvis.

So what song can Dylan make his own? It's a question best answered by the King -- the King of Jingaling, that is.

The 1960s: We just can't get away from them.

As the muddy dust of Woodstock nostalgia settles -- taking with it the whining protests of sensitive little-sibling Gen Xers -- the baby boom is immediately reasserting its pop cultural might, this time in a much more effective way. The marketing campaign for "The Beatles: Rock Band" game moves forward hour by hour, with today's song list announcement stoking an appetite already primed by major media attention, and the already unveiled chart allowing users to check that their fake instruments will work with the highly compatible game. (Sorry, would-be Ringos in possession of "Rock Revolution" drums, you will be purchasing a new set.)

Between the attention given rock's most fondly remembered musical gathering and the careful campaign to remind everyone of what Fab Four still matters the most, any hope non-boomers had that they'd finally moved to pop's center seemed dashed.

Yet the truth is, it's getting hard to argue that any generation dominates pop. A nationwide telephone survey by the Pew Research Center's Demographic and Social Trends project, timed to coincide with the Woodstock birthday, found that while some differences remain between elders and youth, in general they're not a source of antagonism. Furthermore, rock was found to be the dominant music of both generations. President Obama may symbolize the rise of the hip hop nation -- a view that Hua Hsu effectively put forth in his Atlantic magazine piece, The End of White America?, earlier this year -- but it's well known that Obama has Springsteen and Bob Dylan on his iPod.

So what does it mean that 24-year-old New Jersey police Officer Kristie Buble didn't recognize Dylan when she picked him up as a possible vagrant during a pre-show stroll in the rain last month? Nothing, perhaps, beyond the fact that even iconic faces age and change. But that small incident also raises a thought about the changing relevance of the generational ideal.