Pulling strings as thank-you

NEWARK, N.J. - It was a most incongruous setting to hear the graceful tones of Gershwin and the pyrotechnics of Paganini performed by a world-class violinist.

Carnegie Hall, eat your heart out: An audience of cabbies in a back lot at Newark Liberty International Airport enjoyed a free mini-concert by Philippe Quint yesterday, a gesture of thanks after one of the drivers returned a 285-year-old violin the Grammy-nominated violinist left in his cab last month.

"This is quite rare, and it is a very special experience," Quint said afterward. "It's a holiday."

The planes passing overhead and the trucks thundering by 200 yards away didn't dampen the mood at the lunchtime performance, where about 200 people - most of them cabbies, including Mohamed Khalil, the driver who returned the violin - punctuated the music with whoops and cheers and danced around the blacktop to some numbers.

Taking it all in from the front row was a beaming Khalil, who immigrated to the United States from Egypt in 1980 and has three sons attending the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. He was awarded a medal last month by Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker, and his family will attend a performance by Quint at Carnegie Hall in September.

"I usually have a conversation with a customer, I feel like they are my guest for however long the ride is," Khalil said, recalling the fateful evening. "He told me he was a musician and he was coming back from a concert. I didn't know he had a valuable violin with him. Lots of people have left things in my cab, but this is the most valuable thing anyone has left."

Quint, 34, did not play the Stradivari yesterday, saying it "got stressed out" during the ordeal and was "recuperating in a very safe place." He displayed his dexterity on an up-tempo number

and on a technically daunting piece by Italian virtuoso Paganini.

He and guitarist Michael Bacon - who performs frequently with his brother, actor Kevin Bacon - played Gershwin's "It Ain't Necessarily So" and an original blues composition that had some in the crowd gyrating to the beat.

"This makes me happy," said one of the more spirited dancers, Ebenezer Sarpeh of East Orange, who said he has driven a cab at the Newark airport for eight years. "This job is sometimes very stressful, and you have to find a way to take off some of the stress."

Quint left the violin, which is valued at $4 million, in Khalil's cab early on the morning of April 21 after riding from the airport to his home in lower Manhattan. The frantic violinist called 911 and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport, and went to the offices of the Newark Taxi Commission to view photographs of taxis.

Khalil, 57, had parked his cab for the night, not knowing that people were trying desperately to find it.

In the morning, an employee used the minivan to take fares to Kearny and Queens, N.Y., before Khalil got word that the Newark Cab Association was asking drivers to check for the missing violin. He met Quint again at the airport to return the instrument.

"All the cabbies are honest, and I'm sure that all of them would have done the same thing," Khalil said yesterday.