Born Blind, Mentally Retarded, & Autistic, And A Jazz Savantl!

Today, Tony DeBlois plays 20 instruments, knows 8,000 songs, and is forging a career in the music industry.

By Jack Thomas for the Boston Globe

It was Sunday morning at the jazz brunch at Skipjack’s on Clarendon
Street, and even the staff was groovin’ to the Winiker Band and a spirited
rendition of “All the Things You Are.” Bill Winiker recalls that he was
snaring drums and that his brother, Bo, with his sweet trumpet, was
trading fours with a blind guy at the keyboard whose chord changes and rolling improvisations were so imaginative that when he finished with a flourish that included a snippet from “Rhapsody in Blue,” folks stopped eating
their eggs Benedict to applaud with gusto. Rising awkwardly and turning toward an audience he could not see, the young man rocked back and forth, his hands twitching nervously, and then he smiled, raised his arms, and said in a voice loud enough to be heard above the applause: “Aren’t I good?”
Meet Tony DeBlois of Randolph, the best jazz pianist you probably
never heard of and a one-man band who plays 19 instruments — no, make
that 20, because he took up the saxophone last December and plays it now, along with the keyboard, when he jams with the Winikers at Skipjack’s.
In El Paso, on a January morning 29 years ago, an auto speeds to the
hospital in a race with death. Inside, Janice DeBlois is six months
pregnant and in labor. Although this is her ninth pregnancy, she has no children, and as she arrives at the hospital, she whispers a prayer: “Please, God, save this baby.”

To the surprise of doctors at the William Beaumont Army Medical
Center, Anthony DeBlois is born alive. He weighs 1 pound, and he’s blind.
Tony’s survival is doubtful, a doctor says. He may be blind forever,
possibly profoundly mentally retarded. He offers Janice an option: Let the
boy die.

“No,” she says adamantly. “He’s a gift from God.”

In 12 days, Tony will need a colostomy. Eventually, he will be
diagnosed as mentally retarded and autistic. Tony remains in the hospital
for 15 weeks. Photographs show his arm to be the size of one of his
mother’s fingers. So small is his mouth that he is unable to nourish by nipple and must be fed by means of a hollow coffee stirrer.

Within days after he is sent home, Tony ceases breathing. His heart
stops. He turns black. While his father calls an ambulance, his mother
sweeps away dishes and sets Tony on the kitchen table. She taps his chest
to trigger his heart, and she breathes into his mouth until he breathes on
his own. After his discharge from the hospital, Tony lives for months on
oxygen.

He is so tiny that for a year his mother dresses him in doll clothes.
With a son so needy, Janice DeBlois gives up a career in law
enforcement and goes back to college to study childhood development. Tony
is now 4, and he has a new brother, Ray, just 6 months old and himself
disabled. Janice is putting away the laundry one day when she opens a
bureau drawer and is startled to see that her husband’s clothes are gone. He has abandoned the family.

Despite Tony’s disabilities, within his mysterious mind, a seed must
have been planted by the Muse of Music. When he was 2, Tony’s mother
invested $10 in a toy piano in hopes of getting him to sit up. It was a
steep price to pay, given the days of dissonance that followed.
Within weeks, though, she heard a few notes from “Twinkle, Twinkle,
Little Star,” rushed to his side to play the rest, and as she now says,
“Boom! He got it right away.”

At 3, he played harmony to Lawrence Welk. At 5, the year he began
piano lessons and was diagnosed as autistic, his mother would use music to
influence behavior. When Tony answered a question correctly, she’d play
his favorite song, “Dueling Banjos.”

When it was time to enroll him in a school for the blind, Janice
DeBlois was relieved to learn there was a school nearby, in New Mexico,
only 17 miles away. The state of Texas insisted, however, that Tony be enrolled
in a school there, the nearest of which was a 12-hour drive. Instead, Tony
was schooled at home for several years, then was enrolled for a year in
the Texas school.

In 1983, the year Janice moved to Massachusetts and enrolled Tony at
the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, he made his professional
debut as a pianist, earning $35 for a performance at the Sunshine Nursing
Home. At age 9, having earned more than $400, he filed his first federal
income tax form.

Adept as he was at music, motor skills were another matter.
Tony was given lessons in violin, because the motion would teach him
how to brush his teeth. He was given lessons on the drum, because the
motion helped him learn to brush his hair. It was not until he was 26 that he
mastered big buttons on his pajamas and, a year later, small buttons on
his tuxedo.

He was slow in verbal skills and at 16 unable to converse.

“You never knew,” says his mother, “whether he was talking about
something now, five years ago, or the future. Unless you knew his life,
you had no clue what he was talking about. And he could not answer simple
questions. Ask if this is a cup, and maybe he’d say `Yes,’ maybe `No.’ He just didn’t know.”

How is it that a boy so lacking in verbal skills gained admission to
Boston’s Berklee College of Music? Once again, the Muse may have
intervened.

The only music that Perkins taught was classical. In order to study jazz piano, Tony was permitted to enroll in jazz classes at the Rivers School, a private preparatory school in Weston. Berklee had granted Rivers the opportunity to select one of its students for a $1,000 scholarship to Berklee, and Rivers chose Tony.

To find Tony’s house in Randolph, it’s better to avoid squinting at
numbers and instead to follow the sound of music that guides you to the
ranch at the end of a cul-de-sac, where Tony is already at work on “Moonlight in Vermont” on alto sax.

Seated at a Baldwin piano, teacher Ed Fiorenza taps out an intro, and Tony jumps in with Sonny Rollins thunder.

“What was the name of that song?” asks Janice DeBlois, plucking lint from her son’s shirt.

Tony answers: “It was ‘This Masquerade,’ Mommy.”

“Make sure Tony knows the name of each song,” she tells Fiorenza.
“If someone requests a song, Tony might know the tune, but if he doesn’t know
the title, he doesn’t have a way to call it up.”

Doctors say Tony has savant syndrome, a condition in which a mentally retarded person has a highly developed talent in a specific discipline, often math or music.

“Among savants, Tony is remarkable,” says Dr. Darold Treffert of
Wisconsin, author of Extraordinary People, a book about savant syndrome.
“Most savants are expert at replication,” the psychiatrist says.
“That is, they have the sensational ability to duplicate what they hear, but it
tends to be literal. What distinguishes Tony is his capacity to improvise,
and that’s what you hear when he plays jazz. Also, most savants are
limited to a specific instrument, usually keyboard,” Treffert says, “and Tony is
rare in his ability to learn so many instruments and to play them so
well.”

At the Dexter School in Brookline one day, Tony is playing piano in
the auditorium, and music teacher Tim Watrows is explaining how Tony was
hired as pianist for the private boys’ school’s spring production of
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. “When Tony came to interview, he knew the
entire show, which is amazing,” Watrows says. “And because he plays by ear, he
can change key to accommodate voices. That’s just advanced musicianship.”
Years ago, Tony’s mother began to catalog the songs he knows but gave up when she estimated the number at 8,000. He has performed on national television, in venues across the United States, and in Saigon, Singapore, and Japan. He can sing in German, French, and Spanish, among other languages, and to demonstrate dexterity, he sits at his kitchen table and sings “Tears of a Lover” in Taiwanese.

It was a Sunday morning 10 years ago, and the Winiker brothers were
playing their usual gig at Skipjack’s. Bill Winiker was whistling along
with the music, and, to his surprise, a young man at a front-row table, Tony
DeBlois, was whistling, too.

“Everything I whistled, he whistled,” recalls Bill, “and he did it in harmony. I thought, ‘Geez, he’s talented.’ ”

At the break, Winiker introduced himself and, learning that DeBlois was a pianist, invited him to sit in at keyboard.

“I didn’t expect much, but when Tony sat at the keyboard, he yelled
out ‘Nica’s Dream,’ which is a Horace Silver tune so complicated only
musicians know it,” Winiker says. “Well, he reminded me of Herbie Hancock,
and with chords and improvisation, he blew us away, tune after tune, 45
minutes, and the audience went wild.”

How is it that an admired jazz pianist who plays 20 instruments and
sings in several languages, with ballads, jazz, hymns, classical, and even
scat among his repertoire, is virtually unheard of? One reason may be
that, in an era when popular images are often the result not of talent but of
high-powered media campaigns, Tony’s marketing strategies are developed by
his mother at the kitchen table of their home in Randolph.

When Tony does draw public attention, often it’s the result of fortune. One day, for example, he was singing for the butcher at a Shaw’s supermarket when he was overheard by a man so impressed by his talent that he persuaded radio host Jordan Rich to invite Tony as a guest on his Boston talk show.

“I’d like him to become more widely known,” says his mother, “maybe
a recording star with a big company.”

Then why not hire professional management? “I’ve thought about it,
but from everything I’ve heard,” Janice DeBlois says, “the stars with big
record contracts, they’re lucky if they get a buck for every CD they sell. When
we produce a CD ourselves, Tony gets everything after expenses.”

Last year, Tony grossed $20,000 in music fees to supplement his $700
monthly Social Security income, his mother says. He would have earned
more, except that his travel was limited after his brother was injured in a fall
that left him a paraplegic. Ray, now 25, lives next door to his mother and
brother.

Tony’s CD Beyond Words, a collection of jazz standards with the
Winikers, is a gem few people have heard. Janice invested $3,500 in the
production of 1,000 copies, but there are only two ways to buy the CD, one
through a website (www.cdfreedom.com). “The other is to call us at home,”
she says. “The Internet takes $2 and gives us $13. If we sell it, Tony
gets the $15.”

Musically and technically superb, the CD has sold 500 copies, which
is not bad for a CD unreviewed, unadvertised, and unavailable in record
stores.

Tony rises daily at 7:15 a.m., heats coffee, and delivers it to his
mother. “I say, ‘Here, Mommy. This is to get your attitude going.’ And
then I give her a kiss, a hug, and a snuggle.”

His personal attendant, Chaniell Tylerlbest, arrives at 7:30, and
while Tony showers, she reaches in to soap his hair. He shaves, although
she touches up what he misses and trims his mustache.

His mother is juggling his music lessons, choir practice, rehearsals
for the Dexter play, and public appearances. Tuesday nights are reserved
for dinner and jamming with his girlfriend, pianist Cydnie Breazeale-Davis of
Watertown, also blind and hearing impaired.

Thursday afternoons he spends with a friend, retired postal worker
Bill Conroy, with whom he sings in the choir at St. Mary’s Catholic church
in Randolph. They practice sacred music, harmonize show tunes, or simply
walk the woods to trade observations about life.

In June, Tony and his mother toured Ireland, where he performed in
Dublin and Limerick in conjunction with a group that promotes art among
people with special needs.

“I remember the day Tony showed up at choir practice and said,
‘Hello, folks. How are you?’ ” says Conroy. “I was taken by him, and I hold him in
awe. When my wife died in February, Tony sang at her funeral. He said he
never sang so sweetly. It was ‘Peaceful Nights.’ ”

Sitting at the kitchen table, Janice DeBlois shouts toward his room:
“Tony, come out here and sing ‘Mama.'”

He emerges, greets his guest, and then, standing next to the refrigerator and rocking back and forth, his forearms parallel to the floor, he launches obediently into “Mama,” in Italian, ending in a long falsetto. He smiles at the applause.

A conversation with Tony and his mother is a conversation with two
people, one mind. She guides his responses and sometimes answers for him.
Tony addresses answers to her and often repeats what his mother says.
What does he hope to accomplish? “Well, this morning I was busy
being pianist for the play You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and it was so much
fun. I’d like to go on Broadway and be in other plays, Mommy. It’s so much
fun. I think about going to Carnegie Hall, Mommy. My teacher says Carnegie
is the biggest concert hall in the world, Mommy. And, hopefully,
performing for President Clinton.”

“He’s not there anymore,” Janice says.

“Performing, hopefully, for Mayor Menino of Boston,” Tony says.
Butterflies? He doesn’t get ’em.

“Never,” he says. “I just feel excited, Mommy. I’m never nervous
onstage; I just feel really joyful and great.”

Janice: “He listens intently to what’s going on . . .”
Tony: “I listen to what’s going on.”

Janice: “. . . because he doesn’t have the visual cues we have, like
when the kids in the musical mix up the order of what they’re doing.”
Tony: “I have to play the order on the piano. Like, for me, my mom,
she does my scoring. She reads me through musical scores.”

Asked where his creativity comes from, he answers at once.

“The heart.” And then, in a play on words, he says: “All the heart
work I put into it, and yes, I am blessed, by God, actually, and I do like
to work hard.”

Many people not blind and not mentally retarded are not happy. They
worry and sometimes cannot sleep. Tony, blind and autistic, says he is
very happy, worries about nothing, and sleeps easily.

Does he believe in God? “Yes,” says Tony, rocking, “and I believe in
the Christian faith. I was at the grocery store yesterday with Chaniell.
She was having problems with the car, so I said, ‘Hail, Mary, full of grace.’

I prayed for her, Mommy. I folded my hands to pray.”
How does a blind man interpret lyrics? How does he sing about snow
or rain or the beauty of a woman’s face? “I use music to teach language,
language to teach music,” says Janice. “In the fall, we play in leaves,
and we sing ‘Autumn Leaves’ together. So if someone requests that song, he
plays it with a memory of the crinkle and smell of leaves. It’s not a blank
thing.”

Tony reaches across the table and touches her arm. “I love you, Mommy,” he says.

“And he is very much a man-child,” she says to explain his gesture.
“Sometimes he’s fully grown, sometimes a little boy.”

“What do you think about when you play something like ‘My Funny Valentine’?” Tony is asked.

“I think about my girlfriend.”

“What do you think about when you sing ‘Blue Skies’? Because after all, you’ve never seen a blue sky.”

“I think about sunshine,” he says.

“But you’ve never seen sunshine.”

“Yes, but my mom teaches me the words. We walk in the sunshine, and we sing ‘Sunshine on My Shoulder,’ and when I walk in the sunshine with my mom, I can feel the sunshine.”