Who’s keeping score?

“The MTT Files” -- an eight-part radio series with Michael Tilson Thomas that begins airing locally tonight at 6 on KUSC-FM (91.5) -- is blazing hot media. Thank you, Marshall McLuhan.

Back in the mid-’60s, when that Canadian theorist and mass-communication guru started talking about hot and cold media -- suggesting that radio overloaded the brain with information while television rattled around in an empty cranium -- Tilson Thomas was a young pianist and budding conductor, cruising Sunset Boulevard. James Brown’s “Cold Sweat” blasted on his radio as he drove from mastering his own cold sweat when auditioning for Jascha Heifetz at his Coldwater Canyon compound to rehearsing Beethoven or Boulez for the Monday Evening Concerts, with Stravinsky in attendance. Then it was off to the Hollywood Bowl to meet Copland.

Now, three decades later, “We Were Playing Boulez, but We Were Listening to James Brown!” is the title of the seventh installment of “The MTT Files,” an illuminating and often profound look at the way classical music informs many of the larger concerns of our day, such as who we are as Americans and who owns music anyway.

In the program with Brown, Tilson Thomas spends an hour talking to the late pop icon, whom he idolized. The overenthusiastic conductor analyzes Brown’s songs from technical, spiritual and personal points of view. He creates a frighteningly edgy collage of the raw, angular, unpredictable sounds of both Boulez and Brown.

Then Tilson Thomas is on to the topic of the aural tradition of music, the roots and ramifications of works never notated. “What’s really happening in music hasn’t been written down,” Brown says in his unforgettably sly, crackling, hipper-than-anything way.

“It’s like making love. If one thing don’t go, you do another one, right? And you’re blessed if you know how.” A nice long excerpt from Brown’s “Sex Machine” zaps the point home.

Some listeners may cringe at Tilson Thomas fishing for compliments from the Godfather of Soul or at his brightest-kid-in-the-class manner. After all, shouldn’t the august music director of the San Francisco Symphony show a tad more modesty or decorum? But if he did, if his still-boyish zeal (at 62!) was not what it is, if his background was not what it is, “The MTT Files” would not be great radio. And great radio this series definitely is.

More important, “The MTT Files” just might, in this age of distraction, make you want to listen with every bit of body and soul to Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” to Stravinsky’s “Firebird,” to John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, to Brown’s “Live at the Apollo” or to Heifetz flying through “Flight of the Bumble Bee” with the greatest of ease.

Tilson Thomas is our education maestro -- it’s almost his birthright. His mother taught middle school in the San Fernando Valley. Meanwhile, the precocious young MTT was a magnet for mentors, be it the famed Russian cellist Gregor Piatigorsky or the underrated composer Ingolf Dahl. He was taken under the wings of Stravinsky, Copland and, most significantly, Leonard Bernstein.

Since then, throughout his career, Tilson Thomas has honored teaching. In the 1970s, he took over Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. Twenty years ago, he founded the New World Symphony in Miami, a professional training orchestra that not only turns out musicians for orchestra posts but is an attraction in its own right. While music director of the London Symphony, he made some interesting educational TV programs for the BBC.

More recently, he has turned the San Francisco Symphony into an admirable education enterprise. The orchestra offers workshops and resources for K-12 teachers. It has produced flashy TV shows on Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Stravinsky and Copland, all out on DVD and including some fine performances, plenty of scenic travelogue shots and rapid-fire morsels of information. If all the fast cutting isn’t fast enough, a website -- www.keepingscore.org -- provides many of the small segments for those who like to click for tidbits.

But “The MTT Files” is on another level altogether. The series is personal. It recognizes that music demands paying attention, not multi-tasking. It takes great leaps of imagination, which can be accomplished much more effectively on radio than on television. And given that MTT is an inspired mimic, his voice brings to life the likes of Stravinsky and Heifetz. He can also be very funny.

It takes Tilson Thomas awhile to find his radio groove. Tonight’s opening program, “You Call That Music?,” deals with noise and music and is overburdened with the vastness of its subject. Pop singer Suzanne Vega is the series host, and she has a perfect radio voice, but even she can’t get away with all the coy references to “our man MTT.” Our man introduces himself in one show with “MTT -- that’s me.”

But as the series progress, it gets better and better. A two-part look at Copland examines the American tradition. At one point, Tilson Thomas turns to a little-known, difficult choral work, “An Immorality,” a setting to a tough Ezra Pound text. He plays and sings it at the piano, first “Jewish” style, all klezmer yoi-doi-doi. Then he tries it down-home “black” style.

Stravinsky is seen through his copyright woes, which not only afford an affectionate portrait of the composer but also provide some context to the current craze for stealing music. Heifetz is also personalized, a cold fish warmed up as we come to understand the whole nature of virtuosity and the issues of emigres’ cultural identity. Brown then reveals a radically different, but not entirely unrelated, instance of culture identity.

Two more shows, concerning Freud’s relationship to the ballet and the nature of musical tradition, were not available in advance. But surely they can do no less than further MTT’s mission to remove any trace of insularity from music in the unique ways that he -- and radio -- can.

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Mark Swed is The Times’ classical music critic. mark.swed@latimes.com