Best Bets: Outside Lands, San Jose Jazz Summer Fest, West Edge Opera, Noontime Concert, TheatreWorks’ New Works Festival, Kid Koala  

Free jazz: Anyone who’s lived in the Bay Area long enough knows the second weekend in August delivers the twin towers of the summer music season: Outside Lands in Golden Gate Park and San Jose Jazz’s equally impressive Summer Fest. Yes, two of the biggest musical bonanzas of the year for some zany reason are scheduled for the same freaking weekend. From Friday through Sunday, Outside Lands (sfoutsidelands.com) serves up a dizzying array of pop, rock and hip-hop stars on several stages with headliners ranging from the Killers to Sabrina Carpenter to Sturgill Simpson and San Jose’s own EDM star Dan Griffith, aka Gryffin. Meanwhile, Summer Fest (summerfest.sanjosejazz.org) takes over several stages and venues in downtown San Jose with entertainers ranging from The Family Stone to Lisa Fischer (who also plays Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage Friday and Saturday) to Herbie Hancock and much, much more. Summer Fest also has a free music component that’s not as well-known. It’s called Summer Fest Club Crawl, and it serves up a variety of artists, DJs and bands at five downtown nightclubs: Poor House Bistro, Sushi Confidential, Signia at Hilton San Jose, the club in San Jose Marriott, and Rollati. The lineup includes artists like Lauren Halliwell’s Blues Chasers, singer Dana Salzman, the Love Supreme DJs, vocalist Jessica Johnson, and the Afro-Cuban outfit Sofrito. Also, the event will live-stream some events from its YouTube channel. Go to the Summer Fest website for details. 

A tempting trio: That gutsy little company known as West Edge Opera is in the middle of its annual summer festival, held this year at the Scottish Rite Temple in Oakland, and this weekend offers opportunities to see all three of its offerings. Friday night at 8 p.m. brings the welcome return of its wildly popular condensation of Wagner’s gargantuan four-opera cycle, “Legend of the Ring,” starring Tracy Cox as Brunnhilde, Philip Skinner as Wotan and Alex Boyer as Sigmund/Siegfried, directed by Sam Helfrich and conducted by Jonathan Khuner. Saturday’s 8 p.m. production is a reprisal of “Jaqueline,” a highly innovative and award-winning work centered around the famous cellist Jaqueline du Pré, whose brilliant career was cut short by her struggles with multiple sclerosis. Soprano Marnie Breckenridge stars, and the single other role in the piece is taken by cellist Matt Haimovitz (in real life, a former protege of du Pré), who plays – her cello.  Sunday at 3 p.m, it’s San Francisco composer Nathaniel Stookey’s “Bulrusher,” based on the award-winning play by Eisa Davis, a world-premiere work commissioned by West Edge that revolves around a young mixed-race girl growing up in Mendocino County. Soprano Shawnette Sulker shines in the role of Bulrusher, so named because she was found as a baby in a basket by a river. Davis, whose play was short-listed for a Pulitzer in 2007, co-wrote the libretto with composer Stookey. Find tickets, $22-$162, at westedgeopera.org.