Rudyard Kipling told us that East and West would never meet, but then, he never heard Rudresh Mahanthappa, Vijay Iyer, or Sachal Vasandani.

From the beginning, American jazz has benefited from the interplay of the two hemispheres. A disproportionate share of early jazz standards allude to Middle and Far Eastern cultures, such as “The Sheik of Araby,” “Poor Butterfly,” and “Limehouse Blues,” as well as “Song of India” and “Moonlight on the Ganges.” Many “serious” jazz pieces by composers of every decade, from Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” and “Ad-Lib on Nippon” to John Coltrane’s “India,” sought to incorporate the Eastern sound in their music. Even before he became a star with Count Basie, the trumpeter Buck Clayton led his own band in Shanghai.

These days, Messrs. Mahanthappa (alto saxophone), Iyer (piano and keyboards), and Vasandani vocals) are hardly the only major musicians of Indian descent on the contemporary New York jazz scene, but they are the most visible. All three have recently released fine, very different, albums: Mr. Mahanthappa’s “Codebook” (Pi Recordings), Mr. Iyer’s “Still Life With Commentator” (Savoy Jazz), and Mr. Vasandani’s “Eyes Wide Open” (Mack Avenue). Mr. Iyer is also appearing tonight in a special concert of duets at Merkin Hall, which will guest star Mr. Mahanthappa, the young tabla player Suphala, and the highly respected keyboardist-vocalist Amina Claudine Myers.

Mr. Mahanthappa has already attained the Holy Grail accomplishment of young jazzmen, which is to have a style and a sound that is immediately distinctive. It is tight, tense, and unforgiving; he tends to fire off rapid bunches of staccato notes and then pause and breathe in unexpected places. He has listened carefully to and absorbed the two alto-playing Colemans — Ornette Coleman and Steve Coleman. It cannot have escaped his notice that the latter Mr. Coleman credited the dance-like fighting motions of martial-arts films as one of his key inspirations; having an Asian musician learn from that approach completes the cycle. If you heard Mr. Mahanthappa on the radio, you might also mistake him for a post-Coltrane player, such as Kenny Garrett, deliberately evoking the Asian tinge. His sharp, piercing tone also suggests a lizard zapping his tongue out to catch passing flies.

On “Codebook,” Mr. Mahanthappa is especially effective in the setting of his acoustic quartet, co-starring Mr. Iyer on piano, Francois Moutin on bass, and Dan Weiss on drums. The title of the album and of the original compositions implies that the tunes themselves are a set of ciphers, both verbally and musically. Bearing that in mind, all of the tunes here have melodies and rhythmic patterns, and one is tempted to mathematically dissect and unveil their inner meaning, such as the funk meters employed in “Enforced Performance,” which starts in medium tempo and revs up to high-speed halfway through “Play It Again Sam.”

As excellent as he is as a pianistaccompanist on “Codebook,” Mr. Iyer’s “Still Life With Commentator” is an entirely different kettle of curry. This CD is the audio component of a theatrical piece described as an oratorio (it was staged in December at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). Using a term derived from traditional European classical music is perhaps his first act of subversion. A “sonic collage” might be a better term, except that the work uses original material rather than sampling existing recordings and newscasts as that term might imply.

For the most part, Mr. Iyer starts with a series of jazz rhythm section riffs, over which he spreads layers and layers of commentary, both spoken and sung, referencing every mode of aural performance from opera to rap. In one particularly striking track (“Cleaning Up the Mess”), he uses both at once. Mr. Iyer and his librettist, Mike Ladd, are obviously intended to disorient and confuse the listener in a way that parallels the overabundance of information hurled at ordinary people — described as “infogees” in the notes — via the news media and the Internet. There are references to animated fathers Fred Flintstone and Homer Simpson, and the funniest track is the half-minute “Fox ‘n’ Friends,” which delivers 1940s-style cartoon voices sprouting semi-obscene euphemisms in rapidfire delivery. If iTunes offers a 30-second sample, you can hear the whole thing.

When I first heard Mr. Vasandani two years ago at Jazz at Lincoln Center, he struck me as a potentially awesome young male singer who had the chops, the smarts, and the charisma to — with a little more training and effort — do the classic jazz-crooner thing better than anyone had done it in at least a generation. If his debut album is flawed, it’s because he’s trying to do too many things: Besides writing his own songs, he’s ambitiously trying to forge a genre of his own that combines jazz with elements of folk and pop — alluding not only to Mel Torme and Nat King Cole but to James Taylor and Sting. The two sides of the equation are not always compatible, especially in terms of intonation and dynamics; the folk-pop route implies a flatness of tone and a mono-dynamic that’s contrary to the vibrancy and expressiveness we associate with jazz.

It’s the standards here that I’m going to return to: I’m not surprised Mr. Vasandani can swing with more of a jazz dynamic on “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” (on which he also scats credibly), but he delivers slow love songs very well. This is the hardest thing for young men, as on the Sinatraderived “I Could Have Told You” and the Shirley Horn favorite “You Won’t Forget Me,” both of which Mr. Vasandani delivers with understated emotion. Nearly every young jazz singer does bossa novas these days, as Mr. Vasandani does on Jobim’s “I Was Just One More for You,” but on Percy Mayfield’s “Strange Things Happening,” he shows that he knows what to do with straight-up blues.

Mr. Vasandani hasn’t yet made the album of my dreams, nor is he as far along in his artistic development as the slightly older Rudresh Mahanthappa and Vijay Iyer, but all three young men are talents imminently worthy of our continued attention.

Mr. Iyer will perform tonight at Merkin Hall (129 W. 67th St., between Columbus Avenue and Broadway, 212-501-3303).