SUN VALLEY : Jazzman Still Blowing Strong at the Age of 90

It is unclear, even to Arnold Brilhart, why he chose the saxophone.

Maybe for no grander reason than it is a relatively sturdy musical instrument.

Brilhart was just a whippersnapper when he decommissioned his first music-maker, accidentally swatting his father’s prized flute off the family piano. A few years later, he dropped a violin while peddling his bicycle. Then, he ran over it.

Saxophones, especially altos, have held up a little better. And 83 years after he picked up his first, Brilhart is still blowing--long after friends like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and the Dorsey brothers cased their own saxes for the last time. Brilhart shrugs. “That’s just what I played,” the 90-year-old says in his typically direct fashion.

A longtime San Fernando Valley resident who moved to Vista this summer after the Northridge earthquake demolished his home and many of the 78 r.p.m. records he played on, Brilhart was a prominent player in music circles from the birth to the decline of the Big Band era. He was a sideman known mostly to those in the business who helped shape that quintessentially American sound and who continues to shape the sax sound itself.

Brilhart played his first note on an alto at 7, and by the time he was 18 was spending five hours on trains to get to and from his home in Yonkers, N. Y., to gigs on Coney Island, playing with the Yerkes Flotilla Orchestra, which performed in Navy uniforms. It was 1922.

Within a few years, he was playing 15 or 20 radio shows a week, recording almost constantly, sitting in the first alto chair alongside the likes of Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and the California Ramblers Orchestra.

That was when music was written down, as it ought to be, he says, and a good musician could sight-read a chart and play it with finesse. “It wasn’t like these guys who just fake things,” he said. He notes, however, that a new wave of gifted young players are learning the classics and still shaping the sax sound.

Along the swing road, Brilhart, like every other discriminating sax player, began his quest for the perfect sound, the right combination of sweet and fat and warm, with enough bite to ring like an alto yet not become shrill.

“I started making reeds and mouthpieces because the ones on the market were so lousy,” he says. So, he filed and honed, glued and experimented in between playing and practicing.

Unlike many of the anarchist jazz players of his age, Brilhart has mixed his philosophies and methods, shunning dissonant solos for clean, clear arrangements, forgoing purism for functionalism. Instead of using traditional cane reeds, he started a company to produce synthetic versions.

Instead of insisting on handmade mouthpieces, he has spent the last 12 years consulting with Rico International in Sun Valley--the world’s largest reed maker, which planned to hold a 90th birthday party for him Wednesday night--on ways to automate mouthpiece production.

“Every one would sound exactly the same! You would know what you are getting,” he said, exasperated at the notion that a player would want a mouthpiece crafted by fallible human hands. And he enjoyed lunching with Charlie Parker, “but I could never understand what he was saying.”

Brilhart is admittedly opinionated, obviously passionate, and after more than eight decades, still in love with the saxophone--as well as a dozen other instruments, golf, the film “Amadeus,” and his wife, Virginia.

“When you get to be 90, people think you’re done,” he said. “I’m thinking about what I’ll be doing 10 years from now.”