Musicians Pay Tribute to Late Journalist/Violinist Daniel Pearl

Posted on Oct 29th 2008 3:00PM by David Chiu
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In 1991, musician Todd Mack placed an advertisement for a fiddle player for a band he was starting in Atlanta. It led him to meeting Daniel Pearl, a violinist and mandolin player, who had just moved to that city to take a job at the Wall Street Journal.

"He walked in," recalls Mack, who is now based in the Berkshires, "and [we] hit it off instantly and became band mates. More importantly we became good friends up until the end."

Pearl is best known to the world as the journalist who was kidnapped and later murdered in Pakistan in 2002. But there was another side to Pearl's life: He was a classically trained violinist who also went to jams. Now musicians are paying tribute to Pearl through FODfest ('Friends of Danny') an annual tour founded by Mack. It is part of Daniel Pearl World Music Days, a series of worldwide concerts during the month of October that uses the universal language of music to spread a message of hope and unity across cultural divides," says its website.

This year's FODfest tour began on October 10, which was Pearl's birthday, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and traveled through 14 cities before concluding on October 26 in Los Angeles. Admission to the shows was free, and donations were accepted to make up for the tour expenses.

"I think the seed was planted the minute I got the phone call that he had been murdered," Mack tells Spinner. "That I had to do something and it had to involve music. Although our friendship grew into something much larger than that, it was always a central theme. It's really what brought us together to begin with in how we met."

Both Mack and Pearl were in a band called Saucy Jack, a reference to the movie 'This Is Spinal Tap.' "He was incredibly talented, first and foremost," Mack now says of his friend. "He was the kind of guy who could walk into any musical situation with his fiddle or his mandolin and just start playing. For a guy who wasn't a working musician, he played music a lot more than some of us working musicians do."

Pearl's violin heroes were Stephane Grappelli and Mark O'Connor, says Mack. "He loved Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley and Bob Dylan. He was pretty all over the map, as I'm I. We found a lot of common ground in that." Saucy Jack broke up after Pearl left Atlanta in 1994, to work at the Journal's Washington, D.C. bureau. "I embarked upon a solo thing and took to the road," says Mack, "I would spend the next several years touring mainly the East Coast. So [whenever I] was in D.C. or New York, Danny would always come sit in and join me."

It took a while for Mack to put together what would be now FODfest. The first one in 2005 was a very informal affair that took place at Mack's house after he phoned and emailed people. "Before I knew it there were 50-60 people in my backyard," he says. "Everybody showed up and there were all these jams before the actual concert. People would just share songs and introduced themselves to one another. I was like, 'This is so Danny.' It really sort of embodied what he was all about."

Last year's FODfest marked the start of an eight-day tour of various U.S. cities. This year's tour increased to 17 days, covering both East and West Coasts, with Mack participating in all of the dates. He estimates that over 250 musicians performed on this tour.

"How many of those played with Danny," he says, "is hard to say without looking at the list. It might be a couple of dozen out of the 250. So as it gets bigger, the circle widens to people who didn't know Danny but feel connected to his story and shared his belief that music is a way of bringing people together. And that's really what we're celebrating, as much as we're celebrating his life."