Part anthropologist, part musicologist, Harry Smith was an avant-garde artist of the mid-20th century with an intuitive ear for history.

He recorded for posterity a Native American peyote ceremony, the chants of Jewish cantors and everyday sounds off a busy New York street. An experimental filmmaker, he innovated his own unique method of animation.

His zest for collecting was just as eclectic - from Ukrainian Easter eggs to Semi-nole textiles. His collection of paper air-planes is the largest ever to be donated to the Smithsonian.

From his astounding collection of 20,000-plus 78 rpm records came Harry Smith's most indelible contribution to American culture - an anthology of rural Southern blues, Cajun tunes, murder ballads and other regional folk music that created the momentum for a folk music revival that gripped the nation in the '50s and '60s.

"He assembled some pretty amazing music," said Ethnomusicology Professor Anthony Seeger.

Selecting 84 cuts from his collection, Smith assembled a set of six long-playing records. Packaged with a 28-page booklet detailing each song's history and bibliography, Smith's sprawling "Anthology of American Folk Music" was released in 1952 by Folkways Records. It introduced a nation to a cross-section of diverse musical traditions.

The anthology's deep influence on generations of artists - from Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia to Lou Reed and Courtney Love - will be heard April 25-26 at Royce Hall when Elvis Costello, Beck, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Marianne Faithfull and others perform a radical reinterpretation of Smith's recordings. In addition, a symposium, "Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular," will be presented by the Getty Research Institute April 20-21.

UCLA Performing Arts' presentation of "Hal Willner's Harry Smith Project" marks the debut show for its new director, David Sefton, who presented a similar concert in London. Another sold-out concert was later reprised in New York City.

"Smith applied a curatorial perspective to the way in which he organized the collection - transcending racial, secular and religious distinctions in favor of musical and thematic connections," Sefton said "The choices he made give this collection its own identity and its strength."

What's also remarkable, Seeger explained, is that the regional music Smith presented, originally recorded between 1927-1934, was virtually forgotten by the 1950s, due, in part, to the Depression and the outbreak of World War II. "For a number of reasons, the regional music in the early 20th century was pretty well forgotten, especially by people living in the cities," Seeger explained.

Moses Asch, the founder of Folkways Records to whom Smith gave his records, recorded the music off the 78's, but he never bothered with copyrights, Seeger said. "In 1952 when he released the music from the 78's, this was basically a pirated set of recordings. He thought this music was too important to be left in the vaults."

When Seeger was director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, he spent five years getting the rights to legally reissue the anthology in a six-CD set that included a video of Smith receiving a Grammy Award in 1991 for his singular contribution to American folk music. The reissue itself won critical acclaim and two Grammy awards.

For more details, go to www.performingarts.ucla.edu or call (310) 825-2101. Seeger will lead a Center Stage discussion one hour before each performance.