Mr. Thomas, who grew adult in a Washington area, became enchanted by jazz after conference clarinetist and bandleader Artie Shaw on a radio. Mr. Thomas mostly played reed instruments, including a saxophone and clarinet, though he also was proficient on piano, trumpet, trombone, tuba and honest bass.

He achieved during large nightclubs, hotels and other venues in Washington. One of a groups he fronted was called a World’s Third Greatest Jazz Band; to call it a “second greatest” would be presumptuous, he told friends.

Mr. Thomas specialized in a normal jazz sound of a 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, with a repertoire that enclosed song primarily popularized by entertainers as different as Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and Eddie Condon. Among a musicians Mr. Thomas after played with during Washington bar dates was cornetist and former Condon sideman William “Wild Bill” Davison.

In a 1979 review, Washington Post jazz censor W. Royal Stokes praised Mr. Thomas in performance. On saxophone, Stokes wrote, Mr. Thomas “displayed his full, large sound with a occasional wispy word and a hold of vibrato. Thomas’s wording is full of small riff-like phrases, though there is not a cliche among them.”

Mason Drummond Thomas was innate in Washington on Sept. 14, 1925, and lifted in Arlington. He spent partial of his childhood on a family plantation in Fairfax County, heading to a nickname “Country.”

He graduated from a aged Augusta Military Academy in Fort Defiance, Va., afterwards served in a Army in Europe during World War II.

As a immature musician, he visited New York, where he busy a 52nd Street jazz scene, visiting with Condon and clarinetists such as Milton Mesirow, famous as Mezz Mezzrow, and Charles “Pee Wee” Russell.

“Those guys were unequivocally something else in those days ’cause we were only kids and they treated us like we were a biggest thing in a world, shopping us food and all and examination after us to make certain zero bad happened to us,” Mr. Thomas after told Stokes.

To addition his after low-pitched career in Washington, Mr. Thomas owned and operated an air-conditioning, refrigeration and heating business until a mid-1990s. In a late 1950s and early 1960s, he left a area and worked in Las Vegas as a musician, restaurateur and bellhop.

His marriages to Lorraine Ward, Nancy Adams and Yus Rustinah finished in divorce.

Survivors embody his companion, Nancy Shimer Greathead of Arlington; a daughter from his initial marriage, Lynn Hunter of Asheville, N.C.; 4 children from his second marriage, Jamie France of New Philadelphia, Ohio, Dale Johnson of Manassas, Guy Thomas of Arlington and Kelly Thomas of Warrenton; a stepson, Bo Depretes of Arlington; 9 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren.