Lucky sevens line up

Wednesday, July 4, 2007 | 1:02 a.m.

If there is anything to lucky numbers, maybe Las Vegas musician Bill Trujillo should shoot craps, play the ponies and spin the roulette wheel on Saturday.

The saxophone player turns 77 on July 7, 2007. That's right, 77 on 7/7/07.

Lucky day, right?

Not to professional numerologist Virginia Wade.

"You go by the personal year," Wade says. "You add all the numbers in his date of birth and reduce them to a single digit.

"But you can't look at just one little number. You have to look at the whole picture."

Trujillo was born in Los Angeles on July 7, 1930.

Add the digits (27) and then add those to total nine, Wade says, which does not necessarily spell luck. If you skip the year, the month and day (14) add up to five, which Wade says means Trujillo's personality leans toward travel and entertainment.

Lucky for him because he's been traveling and entertaining for most of his 77 years.

Trujillo, who learned to read music before he learned to read words and began playing clarinet at age 4, came to Las Vegas in 1951 to play in a band at the old El Rancho.

"Every hotel had a 35- or 40-piece orchestra," recalls Trujillo, who is at his Las Vegas home recovering from back surgery. "It was fantastic."

The band performed with such luminaries as Sophie Tucker, Ted Lewis, the Delta Rhythm Boys and the June Taylor Dancers.

But Trujillo preferred jazz, so after a few months he and a couple of friends got a gig at a jazz club, the Brown Derby, in West Las Vegas.

"It was just a joint," Trujillo says of the dive off a dirt street.

He was young and playing the music he loved.

After a few months, he returned to Los Angeles. He spent a couple of years on and off the road with such legendary band leaders as Stan Kenton and Woody Herman and playing for Ella Fitzgerald, Liberace and Sammy Davis Jr.

"It was wonderful," Trujillo says.

Big bands were still big and jazz was hot across the country. He played in jazz clubs and in venues such as Carnegie Hall, the San Francisco Opera House and Harlem's fabled Apollo Theater and Savoy Ballroom.

"I made a name for myself with Woody Herman," Trujillo says. "I was the featured tenor sax player."

He met and married his wife, Claudia, in Chicago in 1954.

Trujillo didn't like the cold weather, so he took his young family - the couple had a son, Nicholas, and a daughter, Michelle - back to Los Angeles. Soon he was back touring around the world. But it wasn't conducive to family life, so he found work closer to home.

"I was playing at the Crescendo Club on Sunset Strip in L.A. and Stan Kenton told me he was going on the road again," Trujillo says. "I told him I couldn't leave my family. My kids didn't even know me."

In 1960, shortly after Christmas, he received a call to join the band at the New Frontier in Las Vegas playing for "Holiday in Japan," produced by Shirley MacLaine's husband, Steve Parker.

"I've been here ever since," Trujillo says.

It was a great time to be a musician in Las Vegas with 1,500 musicians working steadily. Every casino had a full-time orchestra. After four years at the New Frontier, he joined the orchestra at the Stardust (1964- 68) and then the Flamingo.

"There was a new star headlining every week or two," Trujillo says.

Comedians such as Jack Carter, Myron Cohen, Milton Berle and Henny Youngman. Vocalists such as Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Vic Damone.

"It was wonderful," he says. "We played six nights a week."

On the seventh night, the hotels brought in a relief band. Trujillo joined a relief band and played at a different hotel every night.

"The band was great, the money was great," he says. "It was the best gig in town."

After a few years he joined the orchestra at MGM Grand, now Bally's. He remembers the 1980 fire that killed 87 people.

"Mac Davis was the headliner," Trujillo says. "I got a call that the hotel was burning. I had all my instruments up there. There was some smoke damage, but they weren't destroyed."

Trujillo's Las Vegas career was in overdrive when a strike by the musicians' union in 1989 brought it to a screeching halt.

"Typically, it was over money," he says. "I figured we'd be out for a couple of weeks and then go back with a $25 raise and be back in business."

But the strike changed the musical landscape of Las Vegas forever.

"The hotels had tapes of all the production shows and they said , 'We don't want you anymore. We have tapes. Goodbye,' " Trujillo says.

Work became scarce. Trujillo went back on the road - at different times with Frank Sinatra and Frank Sinatra Jr., among others.

"That lasted about four years, and then I came back and started playing jazz again," he says. "I loved jazz. I started out playing jazz."

He played jazz locally and at festivals all over the world.

Now, Trujillo says, live music is dead in Las Vegas.

"It's over, totally over," he says. "Oh, there are a few places where they have live musicians, but not like it was before."

Today, Trujillo teaches at two music stores, Family Music on Green Valley Parkway and Music & Arts on Eastern Avenue, and at Harney Middle School. He practices saxophone for an hour a day and the piano an hour a day.

"If I don't practice every day, I don't feel right," Trujillo says.

He gets an occasional gig.

"If I hustled more I would do better," Trujillo says. "But I don't do that. I wait for the phone to ring, and it doesn't ring that much."

But after 7/7/07, maybe his luck will change.