With a full cohort of young followers, Vancouver's big-band legend Dal Richards hits 90 in stride.

Everyone loves a silver-lining story, and here's a good one: 81 years after the fact, Dal Richards sounds almost grateful for the terrible loss that helped him find his life's true path. The year was 1927. The place was Vancouver's Marpole neighbourhood, close to the banks of the Fraser River's north arm. And the instrument of Richards's transformation was not the saxophone, which he'd later make his trademark, but the slingshot.

"Kids in Vancouver at that time, we all had slingshots," the bandleader and broadcaster recalls, reached by telephone at his downtown Vancouver abode. "And when I was nine years old I had an accident with my slingshot and lost my left eye. As a result, I was confined to a darkened room for several weeks. I could hear my friends playing outside–it was summertime–and I just grew very despondent."

A blow such as this could easily have led to introversion or worse, but Richards had an ally in his doctor, who recalled that the boy's mother had a musical bent.

"The doctor told her, 'You play piano and sing; maybe your son has some musical ability. Perhaps you should find out. It would take his mind off his problems.' So my mother took me down to see the leader of what became a very famous youth band: the Kitsilano Boys Band. The bandmaster was Arthur Delamont, and we had a talk and it was decided that I should play the clarinet, which I started studying."

Richards pauses and chuckles. "It was one of the many forks in the road that I've taken that turned out to be the right one," he says. "But I didn't know it at the time."

That's understandable. Richards also didn't know that the clarinet would lead to the saxophone, or that the sax would soon become the iconic instrument of the swing era, or that within a few years he'd become Vancouver's most acclaimed big-band leader–a position he's held, with only a brief break during the not-so-swinging '60s, for almost 70 years. He's celebrating that career–and his 90th birthday–with a gala afternoon concert at the Orpheum on Sunday (January 6). The festivities are a chance for him to reflect on a life that has been lived to the fullest, and that remains full of work and opportunity.

Asked how the music industry has changed, Richards replies that it has become more of a business. "There's a lot of book work to it," he contends. "I'm at my desk much longer than I am on the bandstand; the work's all done when you're on the stage."

He's always been the consummate professional, however, which is probably why, when he was only 22, his Dal Richards Orchestra was hired to entertain the Hotel Vancouver's upscale patrons at that establishment's penthouse ballroom. "The Panorama Roof was a very glamorous place, the most glamorous place in Canada," Richards says. "It took the town by storm when it opened in 1939, and it changed my life."

The saxophonist's tenure at this tony establishment–from 1940 to 1965–led to a variety of extracurricular engagements, including his first show at the venue that's hosting his birthday gala. But it's not the Orpheum's luxurious appointments that Richards recalls; instead, it's the teenage guest that impresario Ivan Ackery inserted into his band.

"He came to me and said, 'Dal, I hired a little girl at the Kitsilano Showboat the other night, a 13-year-old.' And I said, 'Ivan, that's not quite the image I want.' But he said, 'Would you listen to her?' And she could sing. It was wartime, and her special song was 'There'll Always Be an England', which got a rousing reception at the show. That was Juliette's first professional appearance. She went on to great things on television in Canada, so I guess that's the most memorable gig for me, if I had to pick one out."

Those too young to remember the one-named CBC-TV variety-show host might recognize some of the other artists Richards has fostered, pianist Michael Kaeshammer and singer Michael Bublé chief among them. He's also touting 24-year-old Bria Skonberg as a future jazz star.

"I was invited to a reception by the Vancouver International Jazz Festival group a couple of years ago, and she was awarded a scholarship as Cap College's outstanding student of the year," he says. "They announced her as both a trumpet player and a singer, so I thought, 'My God, what a talent!' I started talking to her, and her folks were there, so I said, 'Next week we're playing Mother's Day at the River Rock Casino; would you like to sit in for a little while with the big band?' She said sure, so I dropped her into our six-piece, all-male brass section–and, man, she nailed it, without a rehearsal, without anything. And she's been with us ever since."

In addition to Skonberg and the other members of the Dal Richards Orchestra, the bandleader's 90th will feature the Chor Leoni Men's Choir and the piano duo of Robert Silverman and Corey Hamm. The latter–a UBC music prof, and Richards's nephew–has arranged a series of variations on "Happy Birthday" for the event. It's a gift that pleases the birthday boy to no end, as does the somewhat more visible tribute paid by business tycoon and amateur jazzman Jimmy Pattison.

"He won't be in town–although if he were, he would be playing 'When the Saints Come Marching In' with us on his trumpet," Richards reports. "So in lieu of that, he's offered us 18 billboards in downtown Vancouver, these huge things, you know. So I'm up there, pictured with my saxophone–and you know how much radio and television I've done? Well, I have never had a reaction like those billboards have generated. All of a sudden I feel like a movie star!"