Autistic Child’s Genius Emerged at 2 : Arts: Now, at 17, the savant is being considered for the Berklee College of Music. Retarded youth’s ‘island of brillance’ includes a rare ability to improvise songs.

From birth, Tony DeBlois, blind and autistic, didn’t seem to have much of a chance.

Then, when he reached age 2, his mother heard him at play on a tiny toy xylophone, perfectly mimicking some of the childhood tunes he had been hearing.

Now, he is being paid to play piano, and is being considered for admission to the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. He also dabbles in the organ, guitar, violin, banjo, recorder, harmonica and handbells.

DeBlois, 17, suffers from savant syndrome, in which a retarded person has a highly developed talent in a specific area, such as painting or mathematics.

Tony, believed to be one of only a few musical savants in the nation, is almost at the level of a professional pianist, said Steven Lipman, Berklee’s director of admissions.

“He’s able to mimic and embellish anything that he hears,” said Lipman. “If he doesn’t get it exactly right the first time, he gets it right the second time.”

Watch Tony DeBlois at the piano, and you see a teen-ager with a trendy tail of hair whose fingers sweep the keys through ragtime, classical and Broadway tunes.

On a recent evening at his home, Tony played guitar and sang Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” and John Lennon’s “Imagine,” then launched into Scott Joplin’s ragtime tunes and Broadway melodies on the piano.

“I like to play the blues, the St. Louis Blues,” said Tony, whose list of musical idols includes Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, among others.

“He can just make up songs, he doesn’t write anything down,” said Tony’s mother, Janice. “He can transpose songs and change them to other keys. He can play ‘Silent Night’ in a waltz, in a polka, in jazz.”

Although Tony admits he has a weakness for turning classical pieces into jazz, his willingness to tackle new musical challenges is unflagging.

“I like the electric keyboard, I like to wear the headphones when I’m practicing,” said Tony, who can only sustain focus in a conversation briefly. “It was just an experiment, how to use the headphones.”

Tony’s “island of brilliance” is more creative than the skills of other musical savants who are limited to repeating tunes they hear, said Dr. Darold Treffert, author of “Extraordinary People,” a book about savant syndrome.

“I had not seen until I came across Tony anyone who was involved in jazz,” he said. “That’s improvisation and that’s another step beyond rote memory.”

Treffert, a psychiatrist in Fond du Lac, Wis., was a consultant to the 1988 movie “Rainman,” in which Dustin Hoffman plays a savant with lightning mathematical skills.

Tony, who is studying jazz piano at the Music School at Rivers in Weston, has earned $200 fees for performances at nursing homes and senior citizens centers, his mother said.

For three years, he has been enrolled in a special five-week summer program at Berklee paid for by the city of Waltham. His family moved here so he could attend the Perkins School For the Blind in the nearby Boston suburb of Watertown. He was born in El Paso, Tex.

Lipman said that despite Tony’s talents, Berklee will study his case carefully because the school doesn’t take part-time students who have not graduated from high school.

“Tony will probably never really be able to meet the letter of the law of our requirements,” he said.

Whether he gets in or not, Tony and his 13-year-old brother, Ray, a special-needs child, have some fierce allies in their mother and her husband, Thomas. When Tony was younger, Janice DeBlois withstood temper tantrums that lasted hours but still encouraged his talent.

“I had to sit him down on the floor and wrap my legs around him, wrap my arms around him, pry his mouth open, put the harmonica in it, and then pinch his nose so he could breathe,” she said.

“In two hours he was doing the train whistle from Johnny Cash’s ‘Orange Blossom Special.’ ”

And if Tony ever had to give up his instruments, he already has a solution.

“Sing,” he said.