What’s contemporary jazz? Three Philly concerts show the genre’s reinvention.

The concept of jazz for some is frozen in an eternal bebop era, with men in suits playing swinging rhythms in smoky nightclubs.

Audiences in search of an update can find three vibrant examples of the genre’s most contemporary evolutions in Philly this week. On Wednesday, Oct. 19, there’s the difficult choice between drummer Antonio Sánchez and his Bad Hombre band at World Café Live, and British trio The Comet Is Coming at Underground Arts. On Thursday, Oct. 20, irreverent jazz wunderkind duo DOMi & JD Beck play The Foundry at the Fillmore.

It’s impossible to deny the jazz bona fides of Antonio Sánchez. Reached via Zoom last week, he was in Mexico wrapping up a world tour with guitar great Pat Metheny. He’s also recorded with such legends as Chick Corea and Gary Burton. But Sánchez’s 2017 album Bad Hombre saw the drummer-composer embarking on a new path, in part inspired by his acclaimed drum-only score for Alejandro González Iñarritu’s Oscar-winning film Birdman.

“The way I see jazz nowadays is as the tool that gives me the freedom to make something that defies categorization,” Sánchez said. “I feel like the role of an artist is constant growth and inner research, and hopefully that hunger for doing more and different things will not stop anytime soon.”

Sampled elements from the albums will blend with live improvisation when Sánchez performs at World Cafe. His Bad Hombre band includes his wife, singer Thana Alexa, as well as Japanese keyboardist/producer BIGYUKI, and Australian bassist/programmer Lex Sadler, each of whom blends jazz and disparate influences. The combination allows Sánchez to create a malleable approach that defies easy categorization.

“Jazz has always been somewhat marginal,” he explained, “and post-pandemic, I feel like what was big before is bigger now and what was small before is smaller now. I’m trying to think a little outside of the box and imprint my jazz knowledge into these projects that have influences from rock, pop, hip-hop, reggae, you name it. But it wouldn’t sound like it does unless it had all the nuance that I’ve acquired through my years as a jazz artist.”

At just 22 and 19, respectively, the keyboard-drums duo of DOMi and JD Beck use all the tools at their generational disposal. They walk between the jazz tradition and contemporary pop, which is fitting because their debut album, NOT TiGHT, was released jointly by venerable jazz label Blue Note and Anderson .Paak’s imprint Apeshit.

Well before dropping an album, the pair had garnered a strong following with their YouTube videos, which mash up dizzyingly virtuosic takes on jazz standards with nose-thumbing juvenile humor and eye-popping outfits that could serve as camouflage in a candy shop. The duo has reached an elusive young audience with music that isn’t that far outside the fusion end of jazz once you strip away the social media-ready trappings. And they’ve been granted the imprimatur of at least one jazz icon: the legendary keyboardist Herbie Hancock.

Danalogue, the synth player/producer of The Comet Is Coming (also known as Dan Leavers), cites Hancock as a touchstone for his style-shifting trio. “The way Herbie has transitioned throughout his career is just incredible,” he said by phone from the band’s tour stop in Chicago.

“He was comfortable having a killer riff and a killer drumbeat and then creating these open spaces, these sonic universes in which to express yourself and communicate with one another as a band. [In the same way], we’re bringing together a new set of instruments in an ensemble to express ourselves.”

The Comet Is Coming is representative of a thriving London jazz scene that has been catching the attention of international audiences in recent years. The trio consists of Danalogue, drummer Betamax (Max Hallett), and saxophonist King Shabaka (Shabaka Hutchings, who also leads the bands Sons of Kemet and Shabaka and the Ancestors). The band’s shows are feverish affairs that feel more rooted in dance music than jazz (Danalogue and Betamax also collaborate as the electronica duo Soccer96).

Their fourth album, Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, was recorded in Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio where the trio improvised together, after which Danalogue and Betamax culled through the recordings to select and reshape the best material. “People imagine improvisation as just making up random stuff,” Danalogue said. “But once you know that your compositional method is based upon spontaneous composition, in your head you’re half writing as you’re playing … The three of us are on an insane wavelength together, so we often link quite nicely.”

While it’s impossible to pin down The Comet Is Coming or any of these artists to a single genre, Danalogue sees that fluidity as a debt owed to the inspiration, if not the literal sound, of jazz.

“Where we intersect with jazz is in the spirit of creating and searching for a new sound,” he said. “When a lot of people think of jazz, they think of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, or John Coltrane’s Blue Train, or Duke Ellington. But if you actually look at the arc of jazz, you see a genre constantly reinventing itself.”