If drummers are the engines of jazz, then pianists are often its mapmakers. It’s not just that they’re the bandleaders and the composers; they’re also the content providers, the song finders, the place setters.

They’re the ones with the strongest chordal instruments, the most powerful harmony machines; they bring in the most outside materials and translate them into the language of their time and place. This is the tradition of Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, John Lewis, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock and more recently of Jason Moran and Robert Glasper and Vijay Iyer.

Lately I’ve been following four pianists who are making the jazz scene in New York more interesting. Hearing them in other people’s bands, and more recently in their own, I started to link them — maybe because they’ve all bloomed intensely over the last year or so, maybe because they can be difficult to figure out from a distance. They are all highly schooled and approach jazz sideways, using what they know and making it fit.

FABIAN ALMAZAN

Next week the pianist Fabian Almazan, who is 27 and still unknown to most jazz listeners, will play his first headlining week at the Village Vanguard, opening the same day as the release of his first album, “Personalities.” He’s bringing a string quartet to play four pieces he’s arranged, as well as his trio, with the bassist Linda Oh and the drummer Henry Cole. That’s risky; it’s a lot at once. It’s not unlike him.