If you ever wonder why the jazz press can’t shut up about Miles Davis and John Coltrane, it’s because neither can jazz musicians — these two iconic figures, in one form or another, still dominate the sound of the jazz mainstream in all its permutations. When you talk to musicians about music, Miles and Trane are still the two touchstones most often mentioned. (It’s purely coincidence, I swear, that when I began " Giant Steps " last year, the first four musicians I interviewed cited the Coltrane composition for which it’s named.)

When I talked with three performers taking part in this year’s Boston Globe Jazz & Blues Festival (June 15–22), Miles and Coltrane were again the common reference points, either implicitly or explicitly. Later this summer, Joe Lovano will release On This Day ... at the Vanguard (Blue Note), his second for that label which makes a direct connection with the Davis nonet of the Birth of the Cool era. But the title cut happens to be inspired by late Coltrane, specifically his epochal Ascension (Impulse). Trumpeter Roy Hargrove, meanwhile, has used the twin inspirations of Quincy Jones and the electric Miles Davis (who worked together on Miles’s last project) to take his first head-on plunge into funk and hip-hop, the RH Factor, with a new album, Hard Groove (Verve). John Scofield, who played with Davis from 1982 to 1985, has moved freely among jazz-funk, jazz-rock, and straight-ahead projects his whole career, and currently finds himself riding the jam-band wave with his " überjam " band and their second CD, Up All Night (Verve).

As primarily a tenor saxophonist, Lovano’s probably had the biggest challenge in absorbing the Coltrane influence while also finding his own voice. He’s done it through creating different contexts for his horn (and he’s also added more and more horns to his arsenal) — both in his choice of material and his mix of ensembles. He’s organized trios, quartets, octets, and nonets, deployed the wordless vocals of his wife, the soprano Judi Silvano, and drawn inspiration from sources as disparate as Gunther Schuller, Frank Sinatra, and most recently and most daringly, Enrico Caruso. In Lovano’s own soloing, you can hear the Coltrane vocabulary, but also patterns from Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman’s folk-like melodies and free harmony. But at this point, Lovano’s solos — with his elastic sense of melodic line and side-stepping harmonies — are completely unpredictable and chock full of ideas.

" I never really transcribed and tried to play what other people played, " Lovano says of a common pedagogical practice. " I didn’t grow up like that, " he adds, on the phone from his home in upstate New York. " I grew up trying to learn tunes and be inspired by the way other people played. " Lovano’s first, and probably most influential, teacher, was his father, the Cleveland saxophonist Tony " Big T " Lovano. " You have to be creative within what’s happening rather than just practicing the same things over and over. Lots of cats play the same solo on every tune! "

Lovano’s approach as a soloist goes hand in hand with his compositional approach to putting bands together. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when Lovano’s Viva Caruso was not, as some had feared, an Italian-American tenor falling off the deep end for another Italian-American tenor. Rather, it was a real jazz album, which steered clear of cliché and sentimentality, utilizing an " opera ensemble, " with arrangements for a range of brass and woodwinds, and a " street band " with accordion and voice.

" A lot of people wanted me to do a Hank Mobley record, " says Lovano with an easy chuckle. " But this was a real challenging project. " In part, inspiration for Viva Caruso goes back to Lovano’s playing in Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra of the mid ’80s. " That period was amazing — to play folk songs from El Salvador and Cuba and Mexico or wherever — that really gave me the confidence to try to do stuff like this. And I was in Carly Bley’s band, too, playing Nino Rota and all this crazy stuff. " Also influential, says Lovano, was Caruso’s " whole vibe, his presence, the way he projected. As a soloist, that’s some heavy shit to study. And then Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet — you hear it in their playing, because that was their era, too. You hear that majestic thing — they were inspired by him. "

OVER THE YEARS, since their days at Berklee together, one of Lovano’s regular playing partners has been Scofield. In fact, their collaboration with Dave Holland and Al Foster, Oh! (Blue Note) was one of last year’s best jazz CDs. But for the past three years Scofield as a leader has mostly been indulging his funk-soul side. It only made sense that the musically omnivorous Scofield would follow up his all-acoustic Quiet (Verve; 1996) with the Medeski Martin & Wood collaboration A Go Go (Verve; 1997), landing him square in the center of the jam-band scene.

One of the " big three " of modern jazz guitar, with Bill Frisell and Pat Metheny, Scofield likewise has a taste for electronic effects — another reason the jam scene is a perfect fit. His new Up All Night, the follow-up to 2002’s überjam (also on Verve), is laced with all manner of guitar samples played forward, backward, half-timed, double-timed, triggered either by Scofield or rhythm guitarist Avi Bortnick.

My own preference in Scofield’s playing is for his acoustic-band work, but his funk licks are always charged with wit, and Up All Night’s opening track, " Philiopiety, " with its Yusef Lateef flute sample and stuttering–Porky Pig, backwards guitar is not only great funk but a great send-up of funk conventions. It is, says Scofield over the phone from a tour stop in Denmark, all played live, except for some beautifully deployed soul-horn charts.

Are the foot-controlled electronics something he has practiced with? " I practice the same way I used to, without even plugging in my guitar. But we played on the road 200 days last year and the year before and the year before that with this band. And I just bought all this stuff and mess around with it on the gigs. "

What about the occasional effects screw-up?

" That sort of thing happens all the time. Luckily, this is still jazz. Sometimes my foot messes up. But that’s also one of the fun things about this new technology for me — playing around with it. Because it’s really boring to say, ‘Oh, we’ll have a sample of a Himalayan voodoo singer come in at bar 59.’ It’s cool that you can do that, but improvising with it is the stuff that’s fascinating to me. "

Which brings up another question: he has no trouble calling what he does with the electric band jazz?

" I don’t have another word for it ... I don’t have a problem calling it folk-rock either, to tell you the truth. I don’t get into that thing of what jazz is — I just can’t go there. Because if I define what it is that I’m going to do before we do it, I’m fucked. I sit around and play standards all the time — in fact, I’m going to record an album of standards next year — and I listen to Coltrane records and Duke Ellington. I love jazz. But it’s another kind of attitude to say, ‘That’s not it, that’s not it, that’s it.’ I’d rather allow things to happen and say, ‘I don’t like that, I like this, I like this,’ in order to make music that’s good, that works. "

Up All Night is more varied than überjam, with a couple of soul-jazz numbers, " What You See Is What You Get " and " Four on the Floor, " flavored with tricky progressions and Wes Montgomery–like octaves. There’s the Nigerian guitar sound of " Thikhathali " and the lovely ballad-tempo pieces " I’m Listening " and " Like the Moon. " If there’s more musical meat here, it’s because Scofield the composer is shaping pieces that get beyond booty-shaking vamps. And, speaking of Miles, isn’t that a quote from " In a Silent Way " we can hear on " Watch Out for Po-Po " ?

" It’s pretty much ‘In a Silent’ way, " allows Scofield, " in a major way. "

WHEN I FIRST HEARD Roy Hargrove’s " Rich Man’s Welfare " on the radio, I thought: here it is, the true hip-hop era extension of Miles Davis’s early electric period. Although people called Miles of that early ’70s period a rock-and-roll sellout, a lot of us thought it was as avant-garde as anything going on in free jazz. The rock and funk rhythms were a foundation for free blowing and near-chaotic rhythmic chatter.

It turns out that the all-over counterpoint of trumpet and saxes and the dense hip-hop funk of " Rich Man’s Welfare " is the exception, not the rule, on Hargrove and his RH Factor’s Hard Groove. In fact, that tune is part of a radio-only EP. True, the opening " Hardgroove " develops over some slick harmonies, and Hargrove, alto saxophonist Keith Anderson, and tenor saxophonist Jacques Schwartz-Bart get into some heated contrapuntal exchanges. And Hargrove still delivers his top notes with an explosive, nasty vibrato. But for the most part, Hargrove recruits R&B folks he’s been hanging with for the past few years — D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Common, Q-Tip — for some lite R&B. Not a bad thing, but disappointing nonetheless.

" I’ve been doing the funk thing in secret for a while, " Hargrove says over the phone, " since I was a teenager. I just kind of kept it to myself, and waited for the one day until I could come on out with it. And it took a while. I tried a couple of times before, but I never really could have enough control creatively to make it happen or get the support from the record companies. " And, he adds, " It just seems like this is what I was supposed to end up doing anyway. "

Does that mean he’s dropping his acoustic-jazz projects?

No, he’s still working with a quintet. " It’s all music to me, " says Hargrove. " It’s all the same, just different approaches, that’s all. It’s like wearing a different color suit, a different tie. You’re still clean! Just different colors. "

The Joe Lovano Quartet and Roy Hargrove’s RH Factor play free 5:30 p.m. concerts in Copley Square on, respectively, Tuesday, June 17 and Thursday, June 19. The John Scofield Band opens for Medeski Martin & Wood at the FleetBoston Pavilion on Wednesday, June 18. Complete schedules for the Boston Globe Jazz & Blues Festival are available at www.boston.com/jazzfest . For FleetBoston Pavilion and other ticketed events, call (617) 931-2000.