The last time John Butcher played Vancouver was somewhat unusual, if only for the seeming normality of the circumstances. The British saxophonist and improviser specializes in bizarre venues: over the past decade, he's performed in Masonic temples, Scottish mausoleums, and derelict industrial sites. But at the 2007 Vancouver International Jazz Festival in June, he was booked into the comfortable confines of the Western Front arts centre. And while Butcher has previously sought out a variety of outré playing companions such as turntablist Martin Tétreault, mixing-board minimalist Toshimaru Nakamura, and feral singer Phil Minton at the Front he was part of a saxophone-bass-drums trio, a jazz format popularized by bebop titan Sonny Rollins way back in the 1950s.

Very odd, but what was even stranger was that some witnesses to this concert swore that Butcher, who generally takes pains to sound like no one else, was channelling the spirit of one of the Front's former residents: the late soprano saxophone innovator Steve Lacy.

"Do you know Larry Svirchev?" Butcher asks by phone from his London, England, home, referring to the Vancouver-based jazz writer and photographer. "Well, after the concert he came up and told me I sounded like I was calling Steve. It's very rare that I feel that I have much connection with the people who came from those more jazz-based years of improvisation, but I knew what he meant. I think that came about from that particular combination of instruments, and from the fact that Lacy meant a lot to people in Vancouver. I didn't think about it at the time, but afterwards I thought, 'Well, that must have been lurking away in my subconscious somewhere.'"

He laughs, and then allows that there were times when he wouldn't have considered appearing in a sax-plus-rhythm-section setting even one with such freethinking players as drummer Dylan van der Schyff and bassist Torsten Müller, who'll rejoin the saxophonist for his upcoming Vancouver appearance.

"This combination of instruments has been a very successful one in jazz, simply because everything has its place," Butcher says. "There's a specific role for drums, a specific role for saxophone, a specific role for double bass. But what I'm interested in is how much we subvert that and how much we work with it. Or whether we've agreed to be doing that all at the same time. You can have this in a group, where one of you is intending to really subvert expectations, and that's out of kilter with what the others are doing and that sort of creative friction can be quite fascinating."

Especially when, as is almost always the case for this adventurous performer, all of the music will be made up on the spot.

"Improvisation is a strange mixture of being open to everything and having the resources to respond with what your experience tells you the moment needs," he says. "And you can't explain it by describing it. Or let me put it another way: it needs to have something in it which can't be explained through description. There's a mystery, if you like, that's present, and I think that if you attempt to explain that, you lose it."

John Butcher, Torsten Müller, and Dylan van der Schyff play the Ironworks on Sunday (December 9).