I like annoying music. In some ways I live up to being an open-minded person, but in the realm of music I seem committed to noises that inspire intestinal bleeding in Top-40 types. My limited "tastes" range from grunge to "punk rawk," and this is why I feared the guy with the violin.

He walked into Stuart’s Coffee Shop, like any other caffeine-depleted soul, set down his violin case and talked with friends while I eavesdropped on scattered conversations and sipped my coffee.

It wasn’t long before I heard someone ask him the question I was dreading. The words might be the anthem of my musical apocalypse, and they went something like this: "Richard, will you play something for us?"

As he liberated his instrument from its case, my nearest temptation was to flee from the terrors that would leap from his violin like so many mating felines. I held my ground however because he wasn’t playing anything yet. He was just talking, telling some kind of story—almost like a poem or an old myth of some sort.

As he continued with this story, I became less and less aware of the violin that seemed surgically attached to his left hand. I was lulled into the hypnotizing fog of his words, and my defenses slipped.

Suddenly, before I could react to my "fight or flight" instincts, he was pulling a long, tortured note out of his violin. The sound ricocheted around the room and finally lodged into my spine like a thrown hatchet. That note, and the thousands that followed it, left me transfixed and pitted my brain of all reason.

I sat and twitched in my studded leather jacket trying to reconcile what had just happened to my myopic view of the musical kingdom. It had just been crushed by this guy with a violin.

I determined that I had to meet this person and know what his story was. I immediately enrolled in the nearest university and registered for a class that actually gives credit for magazine writing. Armed with this well-crafted disguise, I asked Richard Marshall for an interview.

Marshall is a 36-year-old Lummi Indian who grew up on the Lummi Reservation. It was there where he mastered his virtuoso skills with some help from world-class teachers and violin makers in the area. After a 13-year hiatus, Marshall is back in Bellingham to share his music and stories. When I caught up with him, he was performing a duet with a plate of eggs benedict and coffee. I settled for just the stories.

"I had this hope that someday I would be a great violinist," Marshall said. "I noticed at an early age that I was different than other kids in orchestra class because the violin was my way of expressing my feelings. I knew that music wasn’t just notes—it was a vehicle to communicate things. I felt that even when I started it in fourth grade."