Traditionally, the jazz community has described its best and brightest freshmen as "young lions." Many of jazz's greatest figures – from Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman – started out as young radicals, rising stars who were not only the new breed but also the music's cutting edge, setting styles and shattering the status quo. When the young lions roared, listeners heard the sound of tomorrow.

But not anymore. Though the jazz world continues to produce an ever-young-ger array of prodigies and virtuosos, the music they're making is astonishingly conservative. Rather than break new ground, young jazzmen like Marlon Jordan, Benny Green and Harry Connick Jr. prefer to impersonate their elders, be it Miles Davis (Jordan), George Shearing (Green) or Frank Sinatra (Connick). But their appropriation of older styles is just second-guessing – none of these kids have taken the time to learn the ropes from established jazz figures, the way Davis did from Parker or Sinatra from Tommy Dorsey. The only real connection these young men have to tradition is through their record collections.

Harry Connick Jr., for instance, is currently being hailed as the new Sinatra, thanks to the surprise success of his soundtrack When Harry Met Sally. Listening to We Are in Love, it's easy to hear why: His vocal tone is warm and inviting, and there's a casual intimacy to his phrasing that makes almost any lyric seem like a shared secret. But suave sonorities are about all Connick can muster. Unlike Sinatra, he never gets below the surface of a song to its inner workings and emotional logic, and without that underlying sense of drama, songs like "It's Alright With Me" or "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" are just empty melodies. Just as Connick the vocalist aspires to Sinatra, Connick the pianist would love to be another Thelonious Monk; hence, Lofty's Roach Soufflé. But his efforts on piano are equally unconvincing. This is paint-by-numbers Monk, reducing the composer's idiosyncratic sound to stiff-fingered phrases and self-conscious dissonances.

Still, at least Connick doesn't try to prettify the music, which is more than can be said for Benny Green. A gifted young pianist, Green takes George Shearing's incisive melodic style and dilutes it on Lineage to the potency of cocktail-lounge jazz, until it ends up like Ralph Lauren for the ears.

Marlon Jordan is yet another young jazzman building a career out of watering down the work of jazz greats. His milieu is mid-1960s Miles Davis, meaning that Jordan tries hard to keep his solos lean and his tone brooding. Trouble is, that's all he does on For You Only, and without the harmonic insight or the inventive dissonance that makes Davis's work so compelling, what we're left with is little more than pretentious mood music.

Still, it may be premature to dismiss these young lions – some may yet develop distinctive roars of their own. Just look at saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who makes cameo appearances on both We Are in Love and For You Only. His solo debut, 1984's Scenes in the City, found him hopelessly in thrall to John Coltrane, but Marsalis refused to limit his playing to strictly "traditional" jazz. He teamed up with Sting, soloed over Public Enemy's propulsive "Fight the Power," even turned up in a few movies – check the soundtrack to Spike Lee's most recent flick, Mo' Better Blues, for a few more Marsalis cameos – and he learned from all of it.

Which may be why on his latest album, Crazy People Music, Marsalis has been able to sort out his influences and arrive at a sound of his own. Listen closely and it's still possible to hear his debt to Coltrane, notably in the chord-stacking extrapolations in "Rose Petals." But Coltrane is neither the only echo in Marsalis's music (Hank Mobley is another strong presence) nor the dominant influence in these performances; Marsalis's phrasing, tone and improvisatory approach are clearly his own. Unlike his juniors on the jazz scene, Marsalis understands the crucial difference between merely following another's footsteps across ground that has already been broken and blazing a new trail to a new destination. (RS 586)

J.D. CONSIDINE