He’s been making music for 53 years, and San Diego jazzman Joe Marillo shows no signs of slowing down.

Veteran jazz saxman Joe Marillo.

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“It never gets old,” says the veteran tenor saxophonist, who will turn 78 in May. “I could play all day. The more you play, the more you get into the alpha state. It thrills me.”

Local jazz enthusiasts need no introduction to Marillo, who came to San Diego in 1974 after playing music 10 years in Las Vegas. His Joe Marillo Quartet was a staple of bygone clubs like the Crossroads downtown, International Blend in North Park and Chuck’s Steakhouse in La Jolla, as well as venues including the top of the Summerhouse Inn, also in La Jolla, and the Catamaran in Pacific Beach. Besides building up a loyal base of fans, Marillo began giving music lessons the year he came to town, teaching sax, piano and flute.

He’s still giving lessons today, although he’s cut back on the number of students he takes on. And Marillo’s also found a regular weekend gig that suits him just fine: He performs Saturdays and Sundays from 9 a.m. to noon on the sunny patio outside Brickyard Coffee & Tea, corner of Kettner and G, in downtown’s Marina District. He plays for tips, applause and just plain fun.

“I’m outside, I love the sunshine and I’ve turned people on to jazz who I didn’t even know,” Marillo says.

He gets a kick especially out of the reactions of kids to his tenor sax and to the music. “They walk over and they see the saxophone, this shiny object, and they just start dancing,” Marillo says. “They start swingin’.”

For Marillo, who hails originally from Niagara Falls, New York, it was hearing the giants of jazz on the radio in his late teens that started him swingin’.

“On the radio,” he recalls, “I heard Charlie Parker. That was so thrilling to me. When I heard John Coltrane and Stan Getz, they became my idols. It was the sound – the phenomenal swing that those guys had. It’s one of those things that’s hard to explain.”

Getz, a disciple of the legendary Lester Young and a pioneer of the “cool jazz” movement, remains an inspiration today. Marillo will travel to Europe this August to play in the Stan Getz Jazz Festival. It’ll be his first trip across the Atlantic.

Like Coltrane and Getz, who died in 1991, Marillo favors the tenor among saxophones: “It suits my personality. It fits into who I am and what I am.”

As a teacher, Marillo believes students with passion can learn to be good, even great.

“You’ve got to want to do it, first of all,” he cautions. “You also have to have a good instrument and a teacher who really cares about you, like a doctor watching over a patient. And dedication to practice.”

Dedication has brought Joe Marillo to where he is today. That and a certain intangible. “Music, especially jazz, especially improvisation, is music (performed) on the spot,” he says. “It’s magical.”