Optimism is definitely one feature of the inaugural Miami Music Festival, due to add a different beat to Miami's already pulsating Brickell district on Dec. 10-12.

Organizers describe a three-day bazaar of live concerts and music-industry seminars at assorted clubs, restaurants, outdoor stages and hotel conference rooms. If all goes as planned, the festival would join Art Basel, Miami Book Fair International and the Winter Music Conference as an anchor of the local arts scene that also possesses enough international allure to draw folks from out of town.

``The live-music scene in the Brickell area has really been heating up, and its cluster of venues is perfect for an event like this,'' promoter Irwin Kornfeld said in a statement. ``The days following Art Basel, the biggest arts event in America, in early December are also a great time to visit Miami.''

MMF, with serious political and corporate backing, is the most ambitious new entry in South Florida's live-events calendar for 2009-2010. Plenty of established, time-tested offerings also are on tap across Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.

October alone offers plenty of choices: jet-setting electronic dance group Thievery Corporation at the Fillmore Miami Beach on Oct. 9; Os Mutantes, pioneers of avant-garde Brazilian pop at Fort Lauderdale's Culture Room on Oct. 14; Leonard Cohen, statesman of poetic song, in a rare South Florida appearance Oct. 17 at BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, and the Grammy-nominated Miami band Tiempo Libre with its electrified fusion of Afro-Cuban jazz and dance music at the Broward Center on Nov. 27.

And speaking of energy, one wonders how the power supply of the old costumed rockers of KISS will hold up this fall. The group has announced a tour with a penciled-in Oct. 22 date at BankAtlantic Center.

While KISS puts on the greasepaint, another band will be unmasking: Dethklok, the make-believe metal quintet from Adult Swim, plays on Nov. 8 at Pompano Beach Amphitheater, lumbering off the animated frames of Metalocalypse with flesh-and-blood musicians to perform the show's original heavy music. Mastodon, Converge and High on Fire complete that evening's hammer-of-the-gods lineup.

Consider leaving earplugs out and devil-horn hand signs at home during the Jazz Roots series at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, six themed concerts ranging from blues with Buddy Guy (Nov. 6) to vocal music with Manhattan Transfer (Jan. 15) to Latin jazz piano with Eddie Palmieri on April 16.

Jazz and pop share billing at the University of Miami's annual Festival Miami in Coral Gables, with performers including Chilean vocalist Claudia Acuña (Oct. 9); Fort Lauderdale-based, Grammy-winning jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton (Oct. 10), and Shawn Colvin and UM graduate Bruce Hornsby (Oct. 22).

One of the highest-profile jazz shows en route stars a part-time player: Woody Allen, filmmaker, indulging his passion for Dixieland on Dec. 30 at West Palm Beach's Kravis Center. The Kravis also presents one of the genre's emerging young talents, sultry-voiced Sophie Milman, on March 17.

South Florida's club circuit carries on despite the closures of noteworthy venues such as City Limits in Delray Beach.

Revolution Live in Fort Lauderdale has a busy schedule of hip-hop, alternative rock and dance: Ghostface Killah on Oct. 7, RevCo on Oct. 22, Mutemath on Nov. 4, Peaches on Nov. 6, and, on Nov. 27, Skinny Puppy.

In Lake Worth, doors down from the shuttered Bamboo Room, newcomer Propaganda is booking an attractive mix of local and national indie rock and punk, from New York's Vivian Girls (Oct. 21) to Fort Lauderdale's Tongues of the Heartworm (Oct. 23).

In venues such as these -- Churchill's Pub, Alligator Alley, Culture Room, Respectable Street, Dada, Poorhouse, Talent Farm -- many young musicians learn their art, and many young listeners have epiphanies with live music. However small in capacity, however low the cover charge, these places have value to the region's culture and identity that is hard to overstate.

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