8 pm: Jazz

Trumpeter-educator Bobby Rodriguez has recast your favorite holiday music with salsa, mambo and cha-cha rhythms, a tact that emphasizes the celebratory nature of the tunes. Here, he’ll lead an ensemble of the area’s most astute musicians in a program whose name says it all: A Latin Jazz Christmas.

* Bobby Rodriguez’s Latin Jazz Christmas, Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles, 8 p.m. $20 to $25. (323) 343-6600.

7:30 pm: Music

Cornelius Schnauber’s “Goethe’s Faust Comes to Grand Avenue”--Goethe’s text with music by Charles Gounod--will enlist the talents of actor Maximilian Schell, singers Shana Blake Hill, Megan Dey-Toth, Bruce Sledge and In Joon Kang, with narrator Christina Linhardt. William Vendice conducts. This concert is a prelude to the Los Angeles Opera performances of Gounod’s opera in January.

* “Goethe’s Faust Comes to Grand Avenue,” Zipper Concert Hall, Colburn School, 200 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A., 7:30 p.m., $15 to $25, (213) 743-2707.

1 pm: Workshop

The California African-American Museum has the perfect way to celebrate the African-inspired holiday Kwanzaa. At this workshop, kids and adults can create a Kwanzaa basket made of marzipan, nuts ands seeds.

* Kwanzaa Workshop, California African-American Museum, Exposition Park, 600 State Drive, Los Angeles, 1 to 4 p.m. Free. (213) 744-7432. Space limited. No reservations.

all day: Art

Taking a break from his role as the suspicious vice principal Mr. Kraft on “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch,” actor Martin Mull demonstrates his painterly side as an exhibition of recent paintings and watercolors by the actor and artist opens Saturday at Patricia Faure Gallery. Mull’s works will be paired with “Size Matters,” a group show of large-scale works by the Rev. Ethan Acres, John Divola, Jason Eoff, Llyn Foulkes, Jack Goldstein, Maxwell Hendler and John M. Miller.

* “Martin Mull” and “Size Matters.” Patricia Faure Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., B-7, Santa Monica. Ends Jan. 8. Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Free. (310) 449-1479.

8 pm: Dance

Heaven, he’s in heaven. . . . And 100 years after his birth, Fred Astaire deserves celebrating, which is exactly what the Jazz Tap Ensemble and Harold Nicholas (of the Nicholas Brothers), among others, will be doing in “Let’s Face the Music and Dance: A Tribute to Fred Astaire.” Astaire’s widow will participate, which means an abundance of film clips as well as anecdotes. And, once again, his effortless, easygoing image will be exposed as a fraud and his capacity for grueling work emphasized. No matter: The illusion always holds the imagination longer than all the stats about 40 takes for a single shot in a dance number. That’s why it took 40 takes: to make the illusion indelible.

* “Let’s Face the Music and Dance: A Tribute to Fred Astaire,” Harold M. Williams Auditorium, the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. $20; $15 for students and seniors. TK INFO ON PARKING (310) 440-7300.

9 pm: Pop Music

Rhett Miller isn’t one to settle into a single mode. The Texan fronts the acclaimed young alt-country band the Old 97s, he plays with the group’s side project, the Ranchero Brothers, and he does solo shows, like Saturday’s at the Largo. Priding himself on never repeating a set, he typically roams through a wide range of other artists’ songs and some of his own new tunes.

* Rhett Miller, Largo, 432 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles, 9 p.m. $10. (323) 852-1073.

8 pm: Theater

Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities presents “Singin’ in the Rain,” the exuberant musical based on the Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen MGM classic film, with Michael Guarnera as silent-movie idol Don Lockwood along with musical theater veteran Christina Saffran Ashford, B.K. Kennelly and Cynthia Ferrer. Director Jon Engstrom choreographed the show.

* “Singin’ in the Rain,” Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, 1935 Manhattan Beach Blvd., Redondo Beach. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. except this Sunday, no 7 p.m. show. Ends Dec. 19. $30 to $45. (310) 372-4477.

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FREEBIES: More than 300 players make up the tuba-euphonium choir for the “TubaChristmas” concert in Griffith Park, on Zoo Drive near the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, L.A., 7 p.m. (323) 656-6510.

African guitarist and composer Donald Kachamba performs a concert with UCLA students, Jan Popper Theater, Schoenberg Hall, UCLA, Westwood, 8 p.m. (310) 206-3033.