What is Randy Newman doing at a jazz festival? Or aren’t questions like that even worth asking these days?

After all, if I were going to be in San Francisco for the 26th annual San Francisco Jazz Festival, I would probably want to see Newman’s Oct. 17 solo concert at Davies Symphony Hall (even if it is pretentiously titled “The New American Songbook,” whatever that means). He is a brilliant songwriter. He is also a singer and pianist with a style unlike anyone else’s. His recently released new album proves that he’s still on top of his game. So what if his music has absolutely nothing to do with jazz?

What is jazz, anyway? There are probably still a few people, even in a city as open-minded as San Francisco, who can ask, in all seriousness, what Cecil Taylor — another one-of-a-kind pianist performing unaccompanied (at Grace Cathedral on Oct. 24) — is doing at a jazz festival.

The difference is that Cecil Taylor is part of the jazz tradition, even if he upholds that tradition in a highly unorthodox way, and he has been performing at jazz festivals for a half-century. Randy Newman is not, has not, and seems to be on the San Francisco schedule mostly to sell tickets.

But let’s cut Randall Kline and the rest of the San Francisco Jazz Festival brain trust some slack. If they had financial reasons for booking a big non-jazz name, they could have done a whole lot worse — as so many other festivals have, over the years. (The handful of other non-jazz artists on the schedule, including the great Mavis Staples, have been intelligently chosen as well.)

And it’s not as if the festival lacks for bona fide jazz names. Dave Brubeck and Archie Shepp will be there, as will the latest version of Charlie Haden’s awesome Liberation Music Orchestra. There are some intriguing concepts on the schedule, too, notably “Miles From India,” a fresh interpretation of Miles Davis’s music with Indian musicians like Badal Roy alongside the likes of Wallace Roney and Lenny White.

As always, the San Francisco festival will also put some local musicians in the spotlight, at shows like “Bay Area Sax Summit,” featuring Dave Ellis, Dayna Stephens and Mitch Marcus, on Oct. 30 at the Great American Music Hall. The organizers deserve credit for that. For that matter, they deserve credit for presenting a festival that lasts more than a month (this year’s bash runs from Oct. 3 through Nov. 9) — and for staging events throughout the year, throughout the Bay Area, reminding everyone that thoughtful jazz programming doesn’t have to end when festival season does.