Tony DeBlois - the blind autistic savant who plays 20 instruments

From Volume 4 Number 10

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA: At birth, Tony DeBlois weighed less than 2 pounds, became blind within days and was later diagnosed as autistic, but ignoring conventional wisdom, his mother's love uncovered his musical genius.
    Tony now plays 20 instruments and knows more than 8,000 songs.
    "I feel special when I play this kind of music. I sort of blossom," he said.
    It was his mother who first noticed his musical ability at the age of two, when she bought him a toy piano.
    "The more music that we've given him, the more language we got out of him. I used to teach him vocabulary by singing songs to him, said Tony's mother, Janice DeBlois.
    Yet, he never really spoke conversationally until he went to the Berklee College of Music and graduated with honours, much to the amazement of all the so-called "experts."
    Now, his extraordinary life is in the pages of a new book - Some Kind of Genius.
    "I've always wanted to write a book for a long time. Any time you write something out on paper, you relive every event," Janice DeBlois said.
    It has truly been his mother's love that not only saved Tony from death - when doctors suggested shortly after birth that she let her one-pound son die - but her unwavering determination to help him find his destiny.
    Some Kind of Genius is dedicated, in part, to local musicians Bo and Bill Winiker, who happened to meet DeBlois 15 years ago at Skipjacks during one of their Sunday brunch performances.
            "I feel like I'm in the company of a genius," Bo Winiker said. "When I first met Tony, he wasn't able to communicate with me through the spoken word, but we were able to communicate with music. Working with Tony has been the highlight of our career."
       Whether it was the devotion and tutelage of musicians like the Winikers or the other mentors along the way who believed in giving Tony a chance, his biggest dreamer has been and continues to be his mother.
    "There's nothing that he doesn't think he can do. I open the doors for him, he proudly walks through them," she said.
    Tony has recorded his fifth CD to go along with the book, Some Kind of Genius.

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