India, Nov. 8 -- Three years ago, when the band New Jazz Underground put out a 17-minute YouTube video called The MF Doom Suite, an early commenter wrote: "John Coltrane on sax, Art Blakey on drums, McCoy Tyner on piano, and Ron Carter on bass. Who doesn't believe in reincarnation?" The count was accurate; the tribute was heartfelt (although, in the interests of accuracy, Carter is 89 and very much alive). The MF Doom video features four players: Abdias Armenteros on sax, TJ Reddick on drums, Sebastian Rios on bass, and pianist Eric "Elew" Lewis. It's a classic quartet, but the repertoire is a masked rapper's back catalogue. The set sounds like a Brooklyn street-corner rap session and a hushed Manhattan jazz club set at the same time, and it doesn't seem contrived. NJU is technically a trio (Elew is a frequent guest). Its members are aged 25 to 27. Is Gen Z really listening to jazz? What does it mean if they're also the ones making it? The 17-minute tribute makes sense once you remember who Doom was. Daniel Dumile, born in London and raised on Long Island, spent the last two decades of his life behind a metal mask, a supervillain persona borrowed from Marvel. Acclaimed as a rappers' rapper, he died in 2020, aged 49. Madvillainy, his 2004 album with DJ Madlib, remains the high-water mark of the jazz-inflected underground rap record. For the young musicians of NJU, raised in both traditions, playing it back was an obvious move. A word on that band's line-up, because it matters. Armenteros (saxophone and vocals), Rios (bass) and Reddick (drums) met as students at Juilliard, in 2020. Theirs is a chordless band, with no piano or guitar to fill in the harmony, so the three carry everything themselves. When the pandemic closed the Juilliard conservatory, they took their music to the parks of New York, as buskers; and then to YouTube. This was hard bop, hip-hop grooves and Afro-Cuban rhythm, played by musicians who knew the tradition and were not treating jazz as a walk in a museum. If their 17 minutes of jazzified Doom was a hook, 22 became proof of their staying power. Released in 2022, it is a full-length concert film, over an hour long, shot before a live audience, in a small rented room in New York. There is no studio polish here. The trio plays Nicholas Payton's Jazz Is a Four-Letter Word (2017) with reverence, then pivots to originals such as bassist Rios's Pseudo Latin Vibe, where traditional bebop meets a groove one could dance to. They talk to the crowd, and clearly enjoy being where they are. For many fans, including a newly-minted one such as me, 22 is a true document of the band. They seem at their most authentic when performing jazz live. Then came the album. Hoodies, released this May, holds 13 tracks. In the first half, trad jazz meets modern influences; the second is a blues suite, with Rios as main composer. The title is the band's thesis in one word. A hoodie is the uniform of street culture, and as several tragic incidents have shown, also carries risk for young men of colour. The album's themes of brotherhood and survival make that plain. A hoodie is also the opposite of the dinner jacket in which jazz has for so long been formally presented. Here are musicians who have studied the tradition at one of jazz's finest schools (Juilliard's jazz programme is led by Wynton Marsalis), can play the changes instinctively, but show up in everyday clothes. They take their music seriously but themselves lightly. Is Hoodies a great album? It is an ambitious one, but I would rate it below 22, because of the latter's sheer electricity. The overall potential is undeniable, though. Which brings us back to the question: Are young people really into jazz? In 2018, Spotify reported that UK listeners under 30 on its Jazz UK playlist had more than doubled in six months. While such figures may signal a revival, it is probably not a stampede. Should any of it be a surprise? Every few years, someone proclaims jazz is dead, only for others to declare a while later that a new generation has discovered it. This time around, the camera is a phone, the venue is a living room, and the recommendation sidebar is where discovery happens. Evolving technology, soundscapes and audiences? That's exactly how jazz has always survived....