If Steven Graff has his way, Tuesday night's concert by the Matt Savage Trio will not only raise money but inspire and teach a lot of people inside and outside the school community.

Matt Savage is 13, and he has already recorded four CDs. His latest, Cutting Loose, is full of twists, turns and complicated rhythms and harmonies. From waltzes to odd time signatures to unusual rhythmic combinations, he plays with a groove, accuracy and facility well beyond his years.

The show, at Rhode Island College, is a fundraiser for The Wolf School, an East Providence school for children with learning disabilities; Savage is 13 years old and has autism.

"We all have gifts," says Graff, the show's organizer. "Sometimes it takes a little more work to find that gift. But there is hope, and we all have something to offer someone else.

"And that should be inspirational, not really to parents of kids whom it's hard to see that gift in at first, but just for all of us to realize that there is a gift, and you have to look a little bit deeper than the surface to find it."

Matt Savage began playing piano when he was 6; his mother says he went through a year's worth of beginner's books in half an hour. That's not unusual; Savage has hyperlexia, a strong attraction to written words, colors and symbols. He was reading books at 18 months.

"He considers [his autism] part of his strengths," says his father, Larry Savage, "I think he considers it part of his past, basically."

Matt sees it a little more simply. "I just started playing the piano . . . I just let the music flow through me. I write what comes to me. . . .

"I tend to like the old guys, but I like Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett. They're really good."

The feeling is mutual. Corea has called Matt "delightful and inspiring." Dave Brubeck said, "I keep track of young talent in kids, and he's the first one that I met that young that was that talented. He has such a musical mind that it isn't music that he has to learn." Matt was 8 at the time.

In May, Savage won an award from the Chaka Khan Foundation for his music and his community work, and he went to Beverly Hills to get his award and play with the legendary singer. In June, he was awarded one of four Young Jazz Composers awards by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. The award is for composers between the ages of 12 and 30. Matt won for his song "The Wild Rose." He wrote it when he was 10; he had to hold his entry until he was old enough to qualify.

Tuesday's concert will get a burst of star power from guest drummer Max Weinberg, best known for leading the band on NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien and for drumming with Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band.

Weinberg calls Savage "quite a talented young man . . . If the arc of his learning continues, he's got a great future."

Off to a shaky start

Matt Savage was born with a form of autism called pervasive developmental disorder. His mother, Diane Savage, remembers that Matt slept very poorly as an infant, cried constantly and had major problems with even routine parts of a baby's day, such as baths and diaper changes.

When she started taking Matt to do things with other children, "All of them were failures," she remembers. "All the other kids would sit in the circle on their mommy's lap and clap and laugh and have fun, and he would run out of the room, and didn't want to be touched or held, and didn't want any part of what was going on, and would find a quiet corner. It was heartbreaking, really."

Matt was kicked out of preschool after two days, she says, and shortly thereafter was diagnosed. She felt "shock and relief. I didn't cry for a couple of weeks until it sunk in."

Another effect of Matt's condition was that his hearing was extremely sensitive.

"Music was very gentle and repetitive with him, and he liked it. It was calming to him," says Diane Savage, a former piano player who would sing simple, gentle songs to calm Matt down. "But music other than that, like 'Happy Birthday' or a TV or a popcorn popper, any sounds like that were overwhelming to him, and he'd cover his ears and scream."

Diane Savage was in a group with other parents of kids who had autism, and there she learned about auditory integration training. Music of various kinds is piped in over headphones, but sonically altered so as to desensitize the ear to the frequencies that are unbearable.

Matt first got a treatment with the method when he was 4. Shortly after that, he asked his first question and started to write.

"He was calmer; he was happier; he started holding our hand when we'd go out places instead of running into traffic," Diane Savage says. ". . . It was amazing. And then he started noticing sounds."

That wasn't all. "Now that his hearing was normalized, all his senses were able to take things in." He noticed birds in the trees, which he never had before. Larry Savage said that Matt, for the first time, noticed that his father had hairs on his arm.

Music poured out

When Matt was 6, he regressed. The Savages brought him back for another treatment, and right after that, "the music came out," Diane Savage says. "It just came pouring out."

Matt had a toy piano, with color-coded sheet music. Diane Savage soon transferred that music to her real piano, then gave him some beginner books of piano music. Matt, with his hyperlexia, tore into them.

"I knew right off the bat there was something special then," Diane Savage remembers. ". . . He devoured a year's worth of lessons in a half-hour. I knew there was no way I could teach him."

It took a long time to find a piano teacher who would work with him, but Diane Savage wouldn't give up. And once Matt started taking lessons, it was off to the races.

Matt and his sister, Rebecca, 10, are home-schooled; Matt likes math, science and geography best. "In my spare time I like to study the science of rollercoasters," Matt says. He also likes to look at the cows on his family's farm in Francestown, N.H. "We have all sorts of good stuff there."

He still has problems with transitions, Diane Savage says, and does best with warnings and advance notice. For example, counting down to dinner time -- five minutes, three minutes, etc. -- works better than simply announcing that it's dinnertime. "He'll get frustrated and say, 'You didn't warn me!' "

But she's hopeful. "He has, for the most part, gone beyond anyone's expectations -- certainly what the doctors predicted of him. . . .

"Even just a few years ago, we were worried about whether he'd be able to live a life on his own. Because it's the day-to-day, common-sense things that are difficult. So if his day is structured, then it goes smoothly. But even just a few years ago, it was difficult to imagine him being totally in control of his own life, and maybe having a family and taking care of them. And now it's very easy for me to see. He's grown up so much over the last year even. . . .

"I look at a lot of, for lack of a better word, typical teenagers, and I'm so glad my son isn't like that. He's never mean; he's not violent; he's not into video games; he's polite. The things that a lot of teenagers do, as they're progressing through those difficult years, he doesn't do. And we have open and loving lines of communication.

"He's actually a lot easier than a lot of teenagers. I think he'll give me a lot fewer gray hairs."

One star a month

Matt plays about one performance a month. "Truthfully, I want to keep him a kid," Diane Savage says. "He goes off and he's a star for a night, and then he comes back and he's a kid.

"We do a great number of fundraisers and benefits, where we charge pretty much expenses, because our mission is to help all those people who need the help who aren't getting the help. I guess it's kind of, what goes around comes around. Because we have always appreciated that he is where he is because we were willing to do what we did."

For Weinberg, Savage's story evokes memories of the stories of Beethoven, who composed music though he was deaf, and pianist Leon Fleischer, who lost the use of a hand to tendinitis and composed a repertoire for one hand.

It's not a surprise to Weinberg that music played a key role in Savage's progress.

"Music is one of those elemental forces in our lives that's as important as the connective tissue between our muscles and ligaments," he says; it's "one of the arts that is so direct to whatever part of the brain it hits. It's not surprising that someone with a developmental disorder would be able to plug into that kind of endeavor."

The Wolf School usually holds an annual fundraising auction, says Graff, a hand surgeon from Providence and the father of a Wolf School student. But he was looking for a new idea when he read about Matt, who played in Providence last year as part of a conference on autism. A concert by the young piano player immediately struck Graff as a fitting idea.

"One of the big things about being the parent of a kid who's developmentally delayed is, you wonder whether this person is ever going to do anything for anyone else -- will they ever contribute to the world, or will they just have to be taken care of? . . .

"So I was sitting there looking at Matt, and I was saying, 'Here's a kid who, through the keenness of the eyes of his parents, they saw a spark in this kid, and pushed it.' [His mother] had to push a little to get his first music teacher to take him on; she didn't give up.

"And from there, this incredible flower of a gift came out of this kid from where you would have expected nothing."

The Matt Savage Trio featuring Max Weinberg plays at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday Weinberg at Rhode Island College's Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts, 600 Mount Pleasant Ave., Providence. Tickets are $25 and $50. Call (401) 456-8144.