Despite a widening generation gap, groovesters young and old are finding common ground in each others' music. Generation-Xer's are finding a new appreciation for smooth crooners -- once the social and musical antithesis of raging rock-'n-rollers. Even more significant is the boundary crossing moves of sixties avant-garde jazz and seventies funk fusions. PNS commentator Travis Lea is a staff reporter for YO! Youth Outlook, a newspaper by and about young people published by Pacific News Service.

SAN FRANCISCO -- These days, as I peruse my collection of CDs for the one that will really get my friends grinning and bopping, I'm apt to flip past my entire avant garde hip hop collection and go for a boomin' classic on Verve or Atlantic cut before I was born. Although I'm a militant for newness, sometimes you can't resist a little Coltrane to satisfy a nineties thirst for groove.

Indicators from the record industry and the club scene confirm that I'm not alone. Smooth crooners like Frank Sinatra and Mel Torme -- once the social and musical antithesis of everything raging rock 'n roll represented -- are drawing new attention from the young crowd.

The Tonga Room, San Francisco's premier venue for tiki and lounge entertainment, has seen an increasingly wide scope of age groups swinging together in rare trans-generational style. "I've worked at a lot of hotels and restaurants and I've never seen anything like it," says manager Sanford Choo. "There are couples in their twenties and their sixties dancing right next to each other."

This may be the ideal dynamic between generations, where young and old can bust a move side by side without the standard all-due-respect fluff usually required to bridge the gap. It suggests the emergence of a more open mind among all parties.

Even the icons of the young generation have developed a taste for what were once many baby boomers' nightmares. Tony Bennett has been spotted on stage lately beside the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Sinatra's recent album of duets showcases the old soldier with a host of young singers including U2's superstar frontman Bono. Sinatra's son Frank Junior is even taking a stab at covering his father's hits with an album of remakes entitled "As I Remember It."

Far more significant than this new lean toward the smooth are the boundary-crossing moves of sixties avant-garde jazz and seventies funk fusions, both now part of the standard musical vocabulary of today's hipster. With the nineties hip hop and acid jazz scene proliferating at warp speed, young cats are getting exposed to the sounds of past masters in samples picked up and integrated into today's grooves. And since rap lyrics are often heavily charged with blunt words on politics and change, we can hear an echo from the socio-musical blasts of our parents' generation.

"Jazz has, for a long time, been music that young people like," says Kim Ewing at the NYC office of Atlantic Jazz. The intense underground scene and constant innovation make jazz an enduring passion for youth.

Ewing points to the eighties as a period when nothing was open to young listeners -- there was a musical void. With no solid trends for critics and others to latch on to, the public had no access to the innovation going on behind the scenes. Today's fusions and retromania let young people finally identify with their parents' grooves.

Bill Murphy directs Axium Records, an experimental branch of Island Records. Murphy says that this is the healthiest time for independent labels since only the "indies" seek out "self-sufficient pockets of creativity" and open doors to new listeners without the pressures of target marketing.

Ewing admits that "the music industry overall is squashing creativity," but both she and Murphy note that the labels are doing a good job re-releasing a lot of previously hard to find recordings on disks and on vinyl. And when old music is out on new vinyl, there's guaranteed to be a bad-dog DJ somewhere who will mix it into the groove the next time he spins at the club.

Last Friday, looking to satisfy the need for rhythms, we went to the Up and Down Club in San Francisco's south of Market district. Five bucks a head got us in, and we were welcomed immediately by the warm percussive sounds of the Kenny Brooks Trio. Nestled into a side table, we found ourselves right at home among a diverse crowd of hipsters, young and old. Scoping the scene, I found the energy was pumping through every person in the place.

Later, J.J. Morgan, the club's manager, explained how his place has become a haven for young and old to come together. Since he opened in 1992, he has stayed true to a troupe of local musicians mixing up hip hop and rap with jazz and acid jazz. "It started as a trend for the young guys. Then once they were there, they saw that the music was real, and they were hooked."

Morgan has always mixed it up, staging one set of hip hop sounds followed by some straight-up jazz, showing partisans of both schools that they have something in common. It appears that the scene is now bubbling down to a pure groove that allows people of various age groups to find a common ground.

Despite these remarkable cross-overs, most music heads, young or old, are not too eager to listen beyond the slice of music the record industry is force-feeding them. It's a shame: a little more communication could do us all some good. We all need to make a move toward the trans-generational groove.