Best Bets: Boyz II Men at SF Symphony, Alvin Ailey dance company at Cal Performances and NEA Jazz Masters at SFJazz

The Bay Area is a hub of artistic expression, attracting artists, writers and musicians from around the globe to live, work and create. We highlight some of the offerings here.

Made in America: Symphony San Jose is waving the Stars and Stripes high and proud with this weekend’s concert programs at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts. Conductor Tito Muñoz leads a classical, jazz, blues and Broadway-infused program titled “American Masters,” with featured works by four of our most iconic composers. Aaron Copland’s famed “Appalachian Spring,” which he wrote as ballet music for Martha Graham and for which he snagged a Pulitzer Prize in 1945 tops the list, followed by George Gershwin’s jaunty “An American in Paris” from 1928, which wound up as a remarkable 17-minute dance segment in the Oscar-winning film with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in 1951. An amazingly young Leonard Bernstein rings in next with his “On the Town (Three Dance Episodes),” written in 1944 when he was 26. The incomparable Duke Ellington closes out the program with his 1943 work for his Carnegie Hall debut, the three-movement jazz symphony “Black, Brown and Beige,” which he considered one of his most important compositions. Performance times are at 8 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday; find tickets, $55-$115, at (408) 286-2600 or https://www.symphonysanjose.org/.

Boyz will be boyz: It’s hard to measure the impact that R&B, pop and soul kings Boyz II Men — Nathan Morris, Wanya Morris and Shawn Stockman — have had on the industry. The group, formed in Philadelphia in 1988, has a string of awards and achievements that stretches around the block and then some: four Grammys, nine American Music Awards, nine Soul Train Awards, three Billboard Awards, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and more. They are so beloved in the City of Brotherly Love that there is a two-block long “boulevard” named for them that passes the high school where they first started practicing together in its acoustically pristine boys bathrooms! The trio comes to Davies Hall this weekend for a pair of concerts with the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Edwin Outwater. Expect to hear some of their biggest hits, including “On Bended Knee,” “End of the Road” and “I’ll Make Love to You.” The guys currently have a bracket contest on their website for fans to winnow out their best song ever. Check it out at https://BoyzIIMen.com/. Tickets for their 7:30 p.m. performances on Friday and Saturday are $99-$300 at https://www.sfsymphony.org/.