The Christian Science Monitor

An Irish fiddler in five days? How 'musical extreme sports' connects.

About 20 years ago, Daniel Hoffman, a classically trained violinist who had turned his bow to Klezmer, found himself on the back of a moped of a fellow violinist, weaving through the back streets of Marrakech’s Old City for what would be his first lessons in Andalusian music, the classical music of North Africa.

Mr. Hoffman and his teacher that week, a young musician he met playing in the town square, communicated in the little French they both knew, but their main common language was music.

“He played, and I copied him,” Hoffman recalls, sitting on a closed-balcony-turned-music-studio overlooking fuschia bougainvillea and neighboring boxy concrete buildings in Tel

'Like Irish storytelling''A different way of thinking''Happy music out of tragedy'

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