If it’s late April and the forecast is for rain, then it’s got to be time for the Denton Arts & Jazz Festival, famous for music in the air, food in the stomach and mildew in the tube socks.

It starts at 2:30 p.m. today at Quakertown Park, with a 20 percent chance of rain by the time the Neville Brothers roll onto the Jazz Stage at 9 p.m. to close out the first day’s performances. There’s also a chance of rain on Sunday, when Denton polka icons Brave Combo will close the event at 7:30 p.m. In between, it’s strictly potluck, and that goes for the music and the weather as well as for the garden of gustatory delights that is an integral part of each year’s festival.

Delbert McClinton is the third nationally known headliner on this year’s festival program — he’s appearing at 9 p.m. on Saturday, with thunderstorms possible — and the rest of the three-day fest is jam-packed with top-rank music by musicians from all over North Texas and beyond.

Saturday promises to be a great day both for jazz and youth. The Celebration Stage in Quakertown Park will be the site of performances by no fewer than eight jazz ensembles from the University of North Texas, the Sorbonne of jazz. Being an old sackbutt player himself, our editorialist is especially anxious to hear UNT’s U-Tubes, a trombone ensemble loaded with sliphorn magic. (The One O’clock Lab Band, the Big Bopper of UNT’s stage bands, plays at 5:30 p.m. today on the festival’s Jazz Stage.)

Also on Saturday, the Center Stage will feature amazingly talented musicians from Denton’s public schools. Listen to these kids and hear the future of music.

And all day, on every stage, there will be the sounds of music, the sights of dance, the aroma of funnel cakes. You can hear everything from the low-down blues of Pops Carter to the joyful noise of a Christian group known as PS150. (Psalms 150:3 — “Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet; praise Him with the psaltery and harp.”)

If there is any gloomy news at the Arts & Jazz Festival this year — aside from the weather, which we’ve become used to — it’s the reluctant request by festival officials that we leave our dogs at home.

Dog watching has always been one of the tertiary pleasures at the festival, but there have been canine complications in the past, and officials have asked that festivalgoers not bring their dogs this time around.

We hate to see anyone on two feet or four be denied the pleasures of the Arts & Jazz Festival, but we will bow to the organizers’ good judgment. In truth, we cannot say that the city’s dog population will miss the festival all that much.

The late Leonard S. Depew, Dog of Destiny, a dog who used to live with our editorialist, was a rabid (you should pardon the expression) Lionel Hampton fan: He could sleep to Hamp’s music for hours. But he was always nervous at the festival. Too many tantalizing smells; too many loud cymbal crashes from the stages; too many advances, friendly and otherwise, from huge mastiffs and German shepherds. It was all too much for the low-posted Lhasa apso; he’d return home each year with a bad case of sensory overload and collapse into a deep sleep without even checking his supper dish.

Better to leave the pooch at home; you can bring him a turkey leg.