Jazz people speak with a sneer about soloists who only play snakes. But when two snake charmers can play like expatriate bandleader Steve Lacy and his Parisian sidekick Steve Potts, that's a different basket of serpents.

''Revenue'' found them hypnotically twinned on soprano saxophones, and the theme alone was enough to make your hair stand on end. Soloing first, Potts strung together long skeins of micronotes, coiling them like glistening pearls or tarred rope or glittering reptiles, as the rhythm ebbed and flowed in an ecological way.

It was a far cry from playing snakes, which means merely running the harmonic changes.

Next came pianist Bobby Few, another Parisian on the band's five-week North American tour. He combined a surrealistic imagination with an Errol Garnerish underpinning. 

Then Lacy, the man who inspired Coltrane to take up the soprano, the Moldy Fig who joined Cecil Taylor, began his work, and his sound was a fine, round sound, bigger and better than ever.

As a matter of fact, Lacy's really gotten too good to be an avant-garde player. Instead of unleashing a stream of dazzling intricacy -- a basket of writhing snakes -- like his bass player Jean-Jacques Avenel was about to play, Lacy gave out with a jazz-age moan, for all the world like Pee Wee Russell, tossed off a short ringing phrase, and proceeded to construct a thoughtful, songful, soulful solo, fixing his momentum on a steady course, like the visionary that he is, while waves of chaos battered.

True, he kept, like the rest of the evening's playing, a tantalizing distance between what he offered and what was expected. But he's gotten to the point where he can't not make sense, albeit in a metaphysical way, and there were even frequent healing hints of Duke Ellington or Sidney Bechet.

A bright and brave drum passage from John Betsch ended the solos, and the rough-hewn counterpoint of the theme was heard again. A, B, A -- nothing to fear, and yet . . .

''The Bath,'' which had a definite Fats Waller cast, had preceded this, and it was followed by ''I Do Not Believe,'' a tribute to Stan Getz that had nothing much to do with him, as far as I could tell, except for the fact that it was very well played by those two snakes in the aesthetic clover.

 

 
The man who was playing soprano saxophone long before Coltrane took it up, Steve Lacy, made a furtive tribute to Duke Ellington the centerpiece of the first set on another of his annual visits to North America, this one in 1999.

In his international way, he did not mention the name of the centennial honoree. The piece, which he called "Wait for Tomorrow," started as though it were going to be Ellington's "In a Sentimental Mood."

Lacy found the first eight bars sufficiently rich to last him the entire number, however. And the resources he brought to the elaboration were rather awesome, gleaned during a musical life that began in New York with an exploration of the New Orleans heritage of the instrument as exemplified by Sidney Bechet, then skipped to the avant garde free jazz world he explored with pianist Cecil Taylor, then roamed through the realms of Thelonious Monk, Gil Evans, Fats Navarro, Herbie Nichols and other hard core gents as Lacy roamed the globe from a base in Paris.

All this came out of his skinny little ax, in a gentle and benevolent stream that was nonetheless original, intricate and intense -- the kind of thing jazz at its best used to be.

Assisting him as co-devisers were bounteous drummer John Betsch and Lacy's longtime sensitive associate on bass, Jean-Jacque Avenel. They expanded on the fragmentary rhythmic hints Lacy provided, turning them into sturdy vamps and serviceable stop-time interludes.

In this fashion, the three kept going over the first phrase of the Ellington classic, "In a Sentimental Mood," over and over, a bit like Ravel's "Bolero," only they never repeated themselves. It was very satisfying to hear, yet harmonically, it never resolved.

This is what people mean when they say form.

The number that preceded it, "The Holy La," was faster and had elicited similarly absorbing filigrees from a brief circular flux, like a little whirlpool. The one that followed, "Blink," the title track of a 1983 album, was faster still and took a side trip into some multiphonic musings that tested Lacy's power of instant improvisation.

It was a test that everybody had come to hear him pass, and of course he did it again. In his unassertive, gentlemanly, Euro-centric way, Lacy is a modern master and an expatriate treasure.