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As the longtime producer of the Grammy telecasts, Ken Ehrlich thrives on infusing each year’s show with surprises. This year, he’s thriving big time.

One big part, but not the whole reason, is the ripple effect -- or nipple effect? -- from Janet Jackson’s exposure last weekend at the Super Bowl.

“The [sad part] is that whatever we do at the show is going to be colored by that,” Ehrlich says during Thursday’s production rehearsal at Staples Center, where the 46th annual Grammy ceremony will be held Sunday. “Instead of celebrating what these people have achieved during the past year, Monday morning it’ll be ‘Was Janet there? Where was Janet?’ ”

For the most part, Ehrlich, 61, just rolls with it -- with the same exterior unflappability he exhibited when superstar tenor Luciano Pavarotti decided, 45 minutes after the 1998 Grammy show had begun, that he didn’t want to perform as scheduled. After taking Pavarotti’s call, he quickly ran upstairs and coaxed Aretha Franklin into Puccini’s aria “Nessun Dorma” with a 60-piece orchestra and 30-member chorus.

In this case, barely 72 hours before the show goes on the air, he insists he doesn’t know what he’s going to do about Jackson’s scheduled introduction to the Grammys tribute to R&B; singer Luther Vandross.

Her representatives said repeatedly this week that she won’t be attending the 3 1/2-hour ceremony, which will be broadcast at 8 p.m. on CBS-TV. But with all those viewers beckoning, who knows what will happen at the last minute? The suspense could be good for ratings. (To avoid any more controversy, CBS has imposed a five-minute tape delay on the broadcast.)

Actually, Jackson will be part of what figures to be an emotion-laden tribute regardless. And unlike a week ago, she’ll be wearing a prim pinafore dress. She’ll also be 3 years old -- her age in a photo with her father that’s part of a string of father-child shots that will scroll while 2001’s five-time Grammy winner Alicia Keys sings Vandross’ early hit “A House Is Not a Home” and Celine Dion performs his Grammy-nominated “Dance With My Father.”

In addition to saluting the singer who is still recuperating from a stroke suffered last April, Dion will have a personal connection with the song she’s singing, because her own father died in December.

“The number-one thing I try to do is to put people together you wouldn’t otherwise see together,” says Ehrlich, a compact man with a close-cropped beard framing his face. “You’ve got to have some opportunity, at least on paper, to be stunning. But you never know. For me, it’s sort of like a crapshoot.”

Yet the producer of so many award shows, including “VH1 Honors” and “The Blockbuster Entertainment Awards,” thinks his tenure with the Grammys since 1980 gives him the advantage of a casino habitue using loaded dice.

“I like to think we know the talent well enough to go to people and challenge them. To say to Dave Grohl, ‘Have you ever thought about playing with Chick Corea?’ Or with Justin Timberlake, listening to the live version of ‘Senorita,’ with those horn lines that are just amazing, and telling him ‘I think I could get Arturo Sandoval to come in and play.’

“As a producer, you love to have that kind of talent to play with, and I don’t get that on some of the other [awards] shows.”

The performers seem to appreciate Ehrlich’s musicality.

“He asked me what song of Luther’s I’d like to do, and I said ‘Please, please, please let me sing ‘House,’ ” Keys said after her rehearsal session wrapped. “To me he’s a real music lover. He definitely has a vision of how the performance should be, and I have my vision too, and we bounce things off each other. There’s a real give and take.”

The telecast planning meetings began in late summer, when about half a dozen staffers from Cossette Productions sat down with nine or 10 members of the academy’s television committee. Preliminary ideas were bandied about, with final choices on performers and presenters made after nominations were announced in December.

Each year’s show, Ehrlich says, begins with a clean slate.

“I don’t ever look at the show as though there is a template for it. In the same way that the music changes every year, every year the Grammy show starts with a blank piece of paper. It’s never like ‘Last year we opened with Simon and Garfunkel, so this year we’ll open with ‘blop.’ It’s critical to keep the show, which by definition says performances and awards, fresh with whatever we can do within that framework, and to have some unpredictability and spontaneity, things viewers don’t see on other shows and that they come to look to us for.”

And how do Ehrlich and the show’s other planners manage to line up so many performers who turn out to be Grammy winners? Neither conspiracy nor clairvoyance, he says.

“Unlike some of the other shows, where they do know the results [in advance], we just don’t,” Ehrlich says. “First of all, the performers who appear on the show, a large number of them have multiple nominations, so the likelihood is they’re not going to get shut out.

“There was a time, and I’m more than happy to admit this, we’d put on a performer and love to be giving out the award in that category and we’d be hoping they’d win,” he says. “Our feeling was that it’s great to see the look on their faces when they win a Grammy.

“We’ve moved away from that in the last few years. Now we don’t necessarily tie a performance to the category they’re in. We mix it up more. I don’t think either is right or wrong, but I think we were getting into an area of predictability, where someone would perform and then they’d win. It was never by design; if anything, we are pretty good handicappers.”

This year’s show has 19 scheduled performances, including the White Stripes, Beyonce, 50 Cent and Alison Krauss. The program will also feature a segment that attempts to chart the progression of funk music from Earth Wind & Fire to OutKast.

Along with the Vandross tribute, baby boomers should experience flashbacks galore with a segment teaming Sting, Dave Matthews, the Neptunes’ Pharrell Williams and Vince Gill in a salute to the Beatles’ U.S. television debut 40 years ago on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

With an average of five nominees per category, there are hundreds of Grammy contenders who won’t be on the telecast.

But they’re all music-business professionals who understand that Ehrlich’s mission is to present the most entertaining show and attract as many viewers as possible, and thus would never take a non-invitation personally, right?

“They take it very personally,” Ehrlich says. “Think about it: There are 500 or more nominees. Do you think any of them don’t think they deserve to be on the Grammys, and are reasonably disappointed when they’re not asked? We have to make some rough decisions.”

And what about Ehrlich -- after 25 years, is it all strictly business by now?

“You can’t do this show and not have a partisan feeling about acts you love musically and really like personally,” he says. “I’m not a member of the academy, I don’t vote, and I respect the decisions of their members, but it sometimes gets hard for me to see some of the winners.”

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The 46th Grammy Awards

When: Sunday, 8-11:30 p.m.

Where: CBS, Channel 2 in Los Angeles