Ask Bert Wilson what underlies the way he plays saxophone -- with command and striking individuality -- and his answer might come as a surprise.

"Dance!" he almost shouts with enthusiasm. "It's very grounded in the fact that I had my early training as a dancer. Song and dance, and the ways the words and the melody fit into the dance."

It's an unexpected response because Wilson, a master of many jazz idioms and extended horn techniques on alto, tenor, and soprano saxophones and bass clarinet, does it ail from a wheelchair, which he has been confined to since age 4. It has been a long time since Wilson, now in his mid 50s, used his feet to dance.

Yet, close your eyes and Listen. In Wilson's music, you'll hear nothing but musicality and generous spirit. And yes, his improvisations often dance. Wilson the man exudes the same high-spiritedness as he talks about his life at home in Olympia, where he has lived since 1979' with Nancy Curtis, his longtime companion in life and music. He's as versed in jazz history as anyone, and the breadth of his knowledge and taste shows in his playing. Throughout his career, he has garnered high praise from some of the biggest names in jazz.

Northwest listeners know all that. But every now and then Wilson springs a performance that makes sure no one forgets. Such was his appearance with his old friend, saxophonist Joe Lovano, at the Earshot festival last fall, after Wilson and his band Rebirth had played a solid set to open the evening.

The extraordinary due, during which Lovano repeatedly turned to Wilson as if to make sure it was just one guy in that chair, has already become a part of jazz history in Seattle. But the event was only one of many demonstrations that Wilson can play with anyone.

That's been my goal," he says. "And not to play with the idea that I'm gonna cut this guy or anything Like that, but just because this is my heart -- to try to play my very best, not to play down to people, or not to play less than I can or not to play more. I don't see that I can do anything else."

As he speaks, Wilson seems always eager to get to the next thought. The same intelligence and emotional urgency are heard in everything he plays. With each thought comes fresh enthusiasm as he hauls his burly, curved frame up in his seat.

While Wilson rarely ventures far from Olympia, he shows no signs of slowing the course of progress in his art. He has just released, on his own FMO label, a limited edition CD of archival material from 1971 that still has a freshness that demands attention. He has dubbed the band the Smiley Winters Memorial Quartet in honor of the ace drummer on the date, a Bay Area fixture who died last year.

A phenom on the East Coast in the 1940s and '50s, Winters played with the likes of Sonny Stitt, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker. Both Roy Haynes and Philly Joe Jones cited him as one of their favorite drummers. "The guy was a saint," says Wilson. "He was so dedicated. All he ever wanted was a way to teach kids music and a way to share the music with the next generation."

The newest recording by Wilson and Rebirth is due to be released this summer. Titled Endless Fingers, the project might be the band's strongest to date. Wilson opens the title track with a squalling, unaccompanied bass-clarinet solo. Musically trained listeners might cotton to what will only prick up the ears of others: Wilson nails some extraordinary extended horn techniques, such as running parallel, multiphonic lines in twelfths. The band enters to work up a three-note riff, with Wilson playing the root and fifth and Curtis's flute covers the third. A tight ensemble passage follows, then gives way to a dizzying inside-out solo by pianist Craig Hoyer.

Endless Fingers, which features Wilson's colleague Chuck Stentz on saxophone, was recorded in 1994, just before Bob Meyer, Wilson's longtime collaborator on drums, returned to New York City. Meyer was introduced to Wilson by Jack DeJohnette in Woodstock, N.Y., and Rebirth, the result of that union, dates back to 1974. At various times the band has included the likes of Ed Schuller and Fred Hersch, and Wilson and company have four albums to their credit: Kaleidoscopic Visions (Au Roar Productions, 1982), The Next Rebirth (9 Winds, 1986), Live at the Zoo (9 Winds, 1988), and Further Adventures in Jazz (FMO, 1992).

"I've got 97 songs that I've written and we've only recorded 25 of them," says Wilson. "I'm not going to be hurting for material for a while."

Wilson's career has taken him, often under great hardship, back and forth to both coasts. As a teenager, he moved with his family to Southern California. He drew enough attention on the LA scene that he dared to venture to New York in 1966 with drummer James Zitro. His New York period is captured on two ESY recordings: Sonny Simmons' outstanding Music of the Spheres (1966) with Barbara Donald and James Zitro, and Zitro's own 1967 release, James Zitro. Both have been reissued on CD.

In 1969, Wilson moved back to California for 10 years. After that, he lived briefly in Woodstock before he was lured to Olympia by an old Berkeley friend, pianist Michael Moore. If Wilson's jazz itinerary as an adult resembles that of his peers, his childhood was unique. His grandfather, William 0. Word, was a song-and-dance man in Florida who started teaching Wilson to dance "as soon as I took my first steps."

"By the time I was two I was learning to tap," Wilson remembers. "I practiced dance steps every day, for over an hour every day, which is very difficult when you're three or two. I was a professional performer when I was 4, I'd already worked gigs with my grandfather.

I’d say there wasn't anything that Shirley Temple could do that I couldn't do. That's a joke, but it's true. I just didn't have the long pretty curls."

Then, at age 5, Wilson contracted poliomyelitis. He wasn't the only one. "People were dying like flies -Little children," he says. "Everybody was dying, but I survived for some reason."

Wilson was lucky. 'It didn't really hit my nerves too hard," he says. "I've got complete feeling all the way to my toes." Undaunted, he took up piano and music theory when he was 8. His grandfather turned him on to Armstrong, Ellington and other jazz benchmarks. He heard Armstrong when he was 10.

"I heard Louis with Barney Bigard and it just flipped me out," he says. "I'd thought a lot of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. But when I heard Bigard make those waterfall noises with Duke, and then when he swung so hard with Louis, I went 'Oh baby! Well, I (want to) do that.' "

Because of his academic prowess, Wilson found himself with plenty of free time to pursue his music. He took up clarinet at 13. Then he heard Charlie Parker and was "transfixed."

"I listened to Bird's intro on 'Just Friends.' it just ... my heart went to pieces," he says. "My head went into heavy shards of glass falling all over.

Wilson didn't think he could lift an alto saxophone, so he persisted on clarinet. But by the time he arrived in California and enrolled at Santa Monica City College, he was ready to give the larger horns a try.

"The first thing I did was sign out a tenor saxophone, which I discovered I could hold up and I was strong enough to play," he says. He practiced intensely. His grades plummeted as his musical skills grew exponentially. So he quit college.

Wilson began gigging at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach with the likes of pianist Andrew Hill, Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All-Stars and horn virtuoso Rahsaan Roland Kirk (who liked Wilson's own fledgling band so much that he recruited it away). In his playing, Wilson says, he was trying to "figure out a way to take all these new trips that had come into the music, and some of which I'd found myself."

His style aligned him with howlers such as Illinois Jacquet and Earl Bostic and modernists such as John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, players who intent on taking the music to its next logical place in the universe.

Some of the similarity was synchronicity more than direct influence. Wilson recalls that the first time he played with James Zitro in the mid-1960s. Zitro said Wilson sounded like Sanders and Ayler. 'I looked at him very plainly," Wilson recalls, "and said, Who?' "

In truth, it was saxophonist Sonny Simmons who most inspired Wilson to do his own thing. "At the time, I was studying with Sonny," says Wilson. "Actually I was working with him as much as possible, trying to figure out what the hell he was doing."

Whether playing melodically or free, Wilson is intent on maintaining what he views as a 'wholeness' in his music. "I try to keep the music so that if you eliminate one part of it, like for instance the pre-set form, you strengthen all the other parts," he says.

'The creative instant that counts is the thing that you're doing right there, that minute, to whatever thematic element you're thinking of," says the saxophonist.

Wilson is excited by the way his roots in dancing, which link him to Parker and Sonny Rollins, sometimes leave him out on a limb. Then, he says, 'the only thing you can-do Is jump, and If you're any kind of slick you'll land somewhere close to one, you know. And that's part of the joy of the music, to just take a chance, man"

Of all the great moments Wilson has enjoyed playing with jazz legends, a set with John Coltrane remains the most memorable. In a hushed voice, Wilson says, "It was a very beautiful, stunning experience."

The event happened toward the end of Coltrane's life at a club in Los Angeles. Wilson went there with trumpeter Barbara Donald, who also lives in Olympia, in hopes of sitting in.

Donald surprised Coltrane by telling him she was a trumpeter and the guy in the wheelchair played tenor. "He said, 'Oh really, well come and play then.' Trane dove right into 'Blue Trane.' We took it out and played for about an hour and a half and just completely bent it to the left and just screamed and shouted at each other, musically speaking."

Wilson's work with Simmons in the 70s is another highlight. He has tapes of their sessions that 'sound half way between a bunch of animals in the jungle and some music written by Schoenherg conducted by the hand of God."

As jazz fans well know, Wilson is not likely to be heard on what passes all around the States as jazz radio." Being on real or virtual blacklists, especially close to home, pains him. "I cannot pretend it doesn't hurt," he says. "It cuts me to the quick. It hits me in the bottom of my soul."

Wilson puts a brave face on his physical Imitations. In fact, he quips -but it's clearly true, too -that being confined to a wheelchair was, in one sense, a blessing for his musical development: It gave him all the time in the world to practice.

But the saxophonist also recalls long years of painful solitude: 'I spent most of my life completely alone," he says. 'Completely alone, you know7"

And have bandleaders - the big names and lesser names, with whom he has played so well -called on him afterward to tour or record? 'No."

Does Wilson think it's because of his physical condition? He hesitates. And as he replies, he seems hesitant to admit that - of himself or his fellow musicians: I wouldn't say 'No' on that one. There's something in there that has been ... I know some people in the business who think it's my fault that I'm not out on the music scene living it down, who think I should be wherever they are. And they just have no perspective on, or knowledge of, what it takes to get around. It's certainly not my intention to hassle anybody over it. It's just that anybody needs a bed they can lay on and a bathroom they can get into. That doesn't sound to me like anything outrageous."