They used to call James Brown the hardest working man in show business, but it might be time to hand the moniker over to trumpeter Wynton Marsalis [ tickets ] and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra [ tickets ], who literally plan to swing around the world from February through June on a massive tour that includes 22 U.S. dates.

The group is travelling to China for the first time to reach out to audiences that mainly know jazz through recordings and devoted Chinese musicians. The tour of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou was supposed to happen last summer, but was canceled after American planes bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists and injuring 27 others.

"There was more news on the war than the arts and cultural exchanges," explained LCJO spokesperson Mary Finance Fuss. "We waited because we wanted the best possible interaction with the audience to present this music."

After this year's Chinese dates, the orchestra moves to four Australian cities, New Zealand, Japan and Hawaii before returning to the mainland U.S. The continental U.S. leg of the tour is called "For Dancers Only" and features famous dance tunes from the past, plus new pieces written by orchestra members.

Musicians on the tour include many notable names in the jazz world: trumpeter and music director Marsalis; trumpeters Seneca Black, Ryan Kisor and Marcus Printup; trombonists Vincent Chandler, Andre Hayward and Ron Westray; reed players Wess ''Warmdaddy'' Anderson, Walter Blanding, Jr., Victor Goines, Ted Nash and Joe Temperley; pianist Farid Barron; bassist Rodney Whitaker and drummer Herlin Riley.

The LCJO tours eight months each year, preparing with only a week of rehearsals before performing from a book of one hundred tunes by Marsalis, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Jimmy Lunceford and Duke Ellington. (Many of Ellington's multi-spectrum compositions have been inked for the very first time by Ellington transcription expert David Berger, who figures out what's happening in all those overlapping brass and reed parts.)

Though the LCJO was founded to play Ellington's music, some critics say the ten-year-old orchestra treats the music as more of a museum piece than a breathing art. That view is being challenged by band members' improvisations and by projects that Marsalis and the LCJO have done with leading philharmonics worldwide.

Recent collaborations began when the LCJO and the New York Philharmonic shared the same stage to play alternating movements of Grieg's "Peer Gynt Suite," using both the dramatic orchestral version and one that Ellington reworked for jazz big band. Marsalis then reversed the idea, taking his five favorite Ellington compositions and arranging them for orchestra; symphonies in Chicago, London and Russia opened themselves up to Ellington's soundings of Harlem street life and emotional turbulence.

Then, last year, Marsalis' work with orchestras culminated in "All Rise," a new composition for the New York Philharmonic, the LCJO and a 70-voice choir. The piece premiered at Avery Fisher Hall in New York last December, and an archived recording may eventually be released.

The LCJO's latest release is "Live in Swing City" (Columbia), an all-Ellington disc recorded live at the Supper Club in Manhattan in February of 1999.