Despite a bout with the flu last week, jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis [ tickets ] played his first four gigs in a 14-city American tour on schedule, with his first show at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Urbana, Illinois selling out in advance. The band moves to the West Coast this week, playing Los Angeles, San Diego, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Portland and Seattle.

The tour finds Marsalis' quartet, which includes drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts, bassist Eric Revis and pianist Joey Calderazzo, in an interesting re-grouping period. They are touring in support of Marsalis' latest Columbia release ''Requiem,'' an album that was partly recorded with the late pianist Kenny Kirkland.

An extremely advanced and stylistically eclectic player, Kirkland, along with Marsalis, toured and recorded with Sting. A member of Marsalis' quartet since 1989, the 43-year-old Kirkland died in November, 1998 from a brain hemorrhage and heart disease caused by cocaine use.

While Marsalis completed the ''Requiem'' album without another pianist, he's now touring with 34-year-old Joey Calderazzo, a mainstream pianist who first came to prominence as a member of tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker's band. He recorded three albums for Blue Note in the early '90s and was signed to Columbia Jazz under the recommendation of Marsalis, who is an A&R creative consultant at the label. Calderazzo's first Columbia album, featuring Jeff "Tain" Watts and bassist John Patitucci, is scheduled for release in February of 2000.

The Marsalis quartet with Kirkland had a very powerful drive and ability to move in and out of complex, and sometimes purposeful, improvising structures. By the time they finished a 1998 tour in Seattle, Marsalis felt the band was "ready to hunker down and play some serious shit," according to a March article in ''Downbeat''.

Kirkland's unexpected death cut all of that short. Marsalis could have chosen to tour with just a trio, a vehicle he's successfully explored in a Sonny Rollins-type vein, but the chords and sense of structure that a pianist provide are too important in his current music to leave out.

With Calderazzo's nitro technique and tight musical relationship with drummer Watts, Calderazzo is in an excellent position to renew the quartet chemistry. And since Marsalis is again living on the East Coast after leaving "The Tonight Show," he's re-committed himself to all-out jazz playing. For these reasons, the tour represents a new chapter in the band's development.