It's maybe 8pm inside Flip's Satellite Café in Oak Hill, the first Saturday in January 2003. Erik Hokkanen and J.D. Pendley walk over with guitars to a fortyish couple having dinner. I can hear a little of what she says to Erik: "We're getting married…thirteen years…it was a long engagement." She laughs. Erik and J.D. play a leisurely, lyrical song, Erik calling out a few key changes over his shoulder. "What was that?" she asks a few heartbeats after the song is over. "It's called 'Lovers' Night Out,'" Erik says in a quiet voice. "I wrote it." He smiles a little and moves to another part of the crowded café. Some people are waiting outside to get in. Erik and J.D. flat-pick and strum their way through gypsy music, some Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. Sometimes Erik plays the Reinhardt part on guitar. On other songs he fiddles those fluid Grappelli parts full of play and longing. The Reinhardt and Grappelli recordings I have at home have never been as enjoyable as the music I've heard Hokkanen play live, like tonight. Much later I will hear him say, "It's great to be inspired by great musicians, but it's better finding your voice, your personality. I take satisfaction that I don't really play like Django."

Hokkanen comes to our table, unbidden, at the very end of his one-hour set. He plucks "Pop Goes the Weasel" on his violin for Robbie, my two-year-old son. The man smiles as he plays, leaning in close so Robbie can watch. Robbie's eyes are very big. That's right son, I think, take a good long look. There's a master at work right there.

Something that always gets to me is "the master's touch." This phrase will come up later in a conversation I will have with Hokkanen on April Fool's Day (that date was his choice, thanks). I have for years asked fans and first-time listeners about Hokkanen's music. They describe his playing as warm, genuine, authentic and "more real because it's not all powered up." "It jazzes you up," says Graeme Ramsey, age twelve. "It's soothing," says Barret Smith, also twelve. These two young men are sitting at the same table and have been listening to the same songs. Oh, but that master's touch makes difficult things look and sound natural, almost effortless. It can be different things to different people, even as they all seem quite affected listening to the same music. Wherever I watch people listening to Erik Hokkanen play, I see some smiling. Or closing their eyes.

Erik Hokkanen sings and plays fiddle. And guitar. When I saw him play in a bar on Sixth Street in the early nineties he was playing mandolin. Can't this guy make up his mind?

"I started out on piano when I was four," Hokkanen says. "We had a house piano, a house guitar, fiddle." Just about everyone in his family is musical. He played alto sax in grade school, but the performer in him found disappointingly few playing parts for it in a school band. Then, he says, "I let it go…for folk rock." His oldest brother, Niles, had been listening to the Beatles, and pretty soon Erik was playing Beatles' songs, and a few Irish fiddle and flute tunes-on the mandolin, the instrument Niles had been learning to play.

By the time he was in middle school, Erik had made several significant discoveries. Raised in Florida, he found excellent fiddle players working for Disney World's Frontier Land in nearby Orlando. He learned that mandolin and violin strings are tuned about the same and their fingerings are similar. And he had found some inspiring, accomplished teachers. He studied country fiddle and playing by ear with Toby Stroud (from Frontier Land). And he studied classical violin and reading training with Nick DeCollibus, whom Erik calls "The Maestro." Inspired and ardent, twelve-year-old Erik studied both classical violin and old-time country fiddle simultaneously.

Erik and Niles Hokkanen spent some of their teenage years taping their favorite Bob Wills and Bill Monroe songs from LPs, then transcribing every note so they could learn to play each song. They made exercises out of playing fiddle parts on guitar and mandolin. "It was normal for us to play a country song, bluegrass, a Charlie Parker tune, followed by a medieval tune and then blues," Hokkanen says. "When I first heard that recorder solo on 'Wild Thing' I wanted to learn more about the recorder," he says of the simple, eight-holed flute. He went to the library to check out recordings of seventeenth-century recorder music and continues his explorations in the library today. "There's a lot a great stuff at the library…." he says. It's hard not to imagine him wandering those stacks and bins in his mind, exploration and inspiration closely connected.

Hokkanen's infinite keenness to explore has shaped him into a musical polyglot. I remember fondly a night I heard him play an all-fiddle show at La Zona Rosa in the mid-nineties. Onstage were kids who'd won fiddle contests at state fairs. Later came Mark O'Connor, a nationally-recognized and very prolific fiddler who's very technically accomplished. I had come to hear Erik, who was last in the lineup. The comparison stunned me: no one-not even the well-marketed O'Connor-had the vitality, the steal-from-all-corners-of-the-globe glee that Hokkanen exhibited. His last piece at midnight was a wild, rambling adventure defying classification, a sort of "Night in Tunisia with Gypsies, 2050 AD." The applause after it was the loudest and most energetic I'd heard all night.

Rodney Moag corroborates what I could easily chalk up to my own imagination and subjectivity. "I have jammed with (Erik) on various occasions, and he has backed me on stage, particularly as member of the house band at the Hank Williams' birthday party fund-raisers...The thing that is amazing about Erik is his naturalness in various genres of music. When you hear most fiddlers in this town, they have a stylistic base out of which they operate, which is clearly present when they play other styles. Not so with Erik. When he plays Hank-type hard country, it sounds authentic. When he plays swing, again it sounds like it's his main genre. His European stuff also sounds authentic to me." Rodney "Rod" Moag, PhD, is a bluegrass and country musician (he plays a lot of instruments), record producer, and University of Texas professor who was profiled in the January 2004 edition of The Good Life. He also hosts bluegrass-gospel shows on some Austin radio stations. Moag says, "Someone who took lessons from him reported that Erik said, 'You have to play every single note like you really mean it.' That's what you hear, the intensity in his playing. I guess he can't do it any other way, thank heaven for that!" Amen.

I've heard Hokkanen's "gypsy surf swing hillbilly lunatic fringe fiddlin' and pickin' combos" (according to one Finnish observer) on KUT-FM 90.5. I ask the hosts of Folkways, the long-running Saturday folk-music show if they want to add anything for the, uh, record. David Obermann calls Erik "one of Austin's musical treasures…(He) continues to blaze his own trail with a hot fiddle and a wide-roving musical interest, and we're all the richer for it." I heard Ed Miller say on the air after playing one of Erik's songs, "We're lucky to have him in Austin." A working musician himself, Miller continued, "He's one of the journeyman geniuses of Austin music…he can play it all...truly a mad genius."

Mad genius? If you listen to his playing, you can get the genius part soon enough. But the madness angle is harder to define. Erik Hokkanen's fire and ferocity is perceptible when you see and hear him play. He has a single-minded commitment to playing better every passing day. He's driven. Self-driven. Maybe he does sound a little wild when he says, "I watch a Bruce Lee movie and want to be a better fiddle player. I get charged up from electric performers, people living their vision. Makes no difference what genre or field of endeavor." I ask if this is how it feels witnessing mastery in action. "Absolutely. Shakespeare had it going on. And Django…he was doing exactly what he was meant to do. Django sounds like magic."

Hokkanen says he was fourteen when he first heard and fell in love with Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli's music. "Niles had one album of theirs. He got it in the bargain bin at Zayre for $1.99. I kept going back there to see if I could get one." He studied the recording and the album cover. "It also had a little paragraph by Duke Ellington on the back cover." Time for another trip to the library. Erik soon figured out how to play songs by Ellington, Benny Goodman, and jazz guitarist Charlie Christian as well. At age fifteen Hokkanen remembers saying to himself: "Well, I'll just have to be as good as Django and Stephane." In 1978, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Django's death, Erik said a prayer for him, and that night Django came to Erik in a dream, showing him how to play guitar.

What's the magic in Django's music? "It's that gypsy strain," Hokkanen states earnestly in his small apartment near South Congress. "Listen." He takes up his fiddle, and gives me a demonstration, the finer points of which I apologize for being utterly unable to convey in writing. "This is 'Golden Slippers'…." he plays it about halfway in, that gypsy strain clearly, rakishly evident. As he plays he's lecturing, "Here's the hoedown style…and here it is in Appalachia…and in a Polish village…." Oh my. How many kinds of beautiful can there be for one song? Late afternoon light pours in through his open door. His neighbors must hear stuff like this all the time. For hours. What a place this must be to live in.

"It's their 'blues'," Hokkanen insists. "Bossa nova, choro (like bossa nova, a form of Brazilian jazz), middle-eastern belly dance music, klezmer (eastern European Jewish folk music), Greek rembetika-music of the underground. It can make you want to dance…or cry." He studies it all, the style, the instruments. "Violin, bazouki, Indian…You know the story about the gypsies and where they came from, right?" Well, sorta. "The king wanted to get rid of these people, so he sent them out of India to work. When they tried to come home, he wouldn't let them back in." No wonder their music gets me in the heart.

If you're thinking Hokkanen sounds a little like a professor, you're right. He's had a post as a professor of music at the Sibelius Academy's Folk Music Department in Helsinki, Finland, since 1998. After all, Hokkanen is a Finnish surname. It's just destiny. "In (1987) fate stepped in and delivered Erik to the Finnish homeland where he became literally an overnight sensation, gigging around the country in major festivals and local clubs with some of the top players in just about every known field of music. For many, that summer of '87 still ranks as one of the most magical events in Finnish musical history," chronicler Bruno Grozniak wrote from Helsinki in 2003.

Whoa. Erik Hokkanen: open, humble, deliberate of speech, with some difficult-to-place southern accent. This guy who I'd heard had been chopping cedar in Wimberley. I tried hard to imagine him, with his talented and finely trained hands, out working in scratchy cedar brakes. I mean, were these hands insured? Was he? I wanted to ask him. Ask goofy questions like what inspires him and why isn't he a billionaire.

Confirmed: beginning in 1998, Erik Hokkanen spent many months clearing about half an acre of Hill Country "cedar" (ash juniper) with only an ax and clippers. He intended to save a grove of oak trees. He used the cut wood to make a hogan and baskets. He repaired every soil disturbance. He counted his caretaking of the land a modest success when a visiting Apache elder called the grove a cathedral. Hokkanen studied with Tom Brown, an Apache-trained tracker and outdoorsman, practicing woodcraft along with his music. "I was living a double life: come to town for a gig, then go live in the woods," Hokkanen says of his months spent living in that hogan with one light bulb, a coffeemaker and the silence. "Playing before the Great Spirit is daunting. You're making a sound. You're calling attention to yourself. You'd better mean it," he says. Hokkanen continues his study of Native American, Lipan Apache traditions. "That stuff saved my life. It's part of my education."

"Nature, wilderness are what music looks and sounds and feels like to the Great Spirit. That's the physical representation of music." Hokkanen stops for a minute, then says, "Maybe the trees dream shapes like the guitar. Maybe they gave us the music or the origins of instruments." He holds up his violin and repeats what he asks his students: "The tree gave its life already-what are you going to give?" He says he regards his violin as an Apache might regard his bow and arrow. "I put my hands on my fiddle and thank it for feeding me and my loved ones." He asks his music students if they ever think of thanking the family of trees for their instruments. "The guitar is a living entity, a portal of possibilities." He takes a breath. I feel a need to stop taking notes and digest all this. I have no idea how I must've looked, but Erik pauses before he says, "This is how my brain normally works."

After our break, Hokkanen wants to clear up some misconceptions of musicians. "Ancient Greeks considered music one of the four sacred sciences," he says, sounding like he had just come back from that bygone time. "People ask me, 'What do you do for a living?' as if music was not work. It's equal to a doctor doing brain-surgery or a priest exorcising a demon and nothing less. It's sincere concentration. Being an Olympic-level athlete is a full-time job. Everybody's job is to find their greatness." He pauses to say this carefully: "The role of the musician is to play great music. That's (my) job." Yeah, and to make it all seem note-perfect, fresh and apt, every time you play. And improvise. And invent. How do you do that?

He says "doing your homework to make yourself ready for the moment the spirit comes to you" is the biggest part of his work and few people ever see it or even give it much thought. "People see you in your one hour of glory. The gig is the celebration, the harvest day" after countless hours of work. "Ninety percent of music is listening to that spirit that comes forth" and surrendering to it. "I got up from a nap and thought I was going to practice, but the violin had a different idea." He plays a few bars of something calypso, a tune he says just came of itself. "If you have a clear mind, the spirit comes through. You have to take the time to get the gift of a new song, get it worked out." On a recent day off, he spent ten hours working on one new song. "When I feel a desire to practice, I ask it what I need. That's when it gets good: when the instrument teaches you." Sometimes he practices blindfolded.

Hokkanen admits that for all his natural joy and commitment to his craft, he does have his struggles. "I'm working on dreams and it takes a lot of effort. I have no manager, no press agent. I struggle with myself not to give up. I've been blessed with something that won't let me give up," and therefore "I'm learning how to play." Learning? How?

Erik remembers saying, during the recording his CD Blue Corn in the late eighties, "I don't feel like I'm the musician I hoped I was." I think about demanding songs of his that require nimble, quick fingering. I am surprised when he says, "It's hard to play ballads convincingly. Beautifully. Sweet." By 1989 he'd felt he had hit an unwelcome plateau in Austin. So back he went back to his violin teacher, Nick "The Maestro" DeCollibus, to begin again. "Woodshedding" is what he called it: practicing, alone, for up to fourteen hours a day. Learning. Studying. Was it monkish, like a cloister? "No, more like a sabbatical. It was about facing yourself and your possible potential. You give a lot up to play really well. If you make only average effort, you'll only be an average player."

Hokkanen runs his career, his business, guided by intuition, diversification, fate and sometimes phone calls offering last-minute semi-lucrative gigs at big hotels. Club gigs usually don't pay much, he confirms. I imagine most working musicians who aren't studio musicians have a somewhat erratic schedule, and yes, Hokkanen does too. I get the idea he's mostly scheduled days out, not months in advance. Then he says he's just gotten another call back from Cirque de Soleil. He'd submitted a tape and then a CD to them of him playing the score to Varekai, one of their many shows. He could be leaving for Cirque de Soleil's European tour in a month or two. He's got some May dates to play in Finland. He's got upcoming recording to do with the tango-licious Tosca String Quartet, which calls itself "the She Wolves" when playing with him. The name is a sly spin on Erik Hokkanen and Lumisudet (Finnish for "Snow Wolves"), the band he records with in Finland. And in about an hour from the time we talk, Erik will be off to play "First Thursday" on South Congress. He might be joined with a band mate from the Riff Riders, the Offbeats, or the Hip Replacements, who all have made CDs with him (see accompanying discography).

I've read that major-label recording artists typically receive less than a dollar for every recording sold. Waterloo Records-Austin's local hero, especially for Austin musicians-let me know Erik sells his recordings on consignment, and he doesn't have a distributor. I ask how his CD sales are faring. "Since I wrote all the music, overseen all the production, all the costs, I can sell ten times less and make five times more." Hokkanen calls it "small mass production. Every piece passes through my hands." When you buy one of Erik Hokkanen's CDs, odds are the person who packaged it was…Erik Hokkanen. "I might spend six hours a week putting those things together," he says of this Austin cottage industry. "They're like my cedar baskets."

Combining profits from record sales, wedding gigs and rehearsals, private parties, barbeques, and giving music lessons, Hokkanen says, "I feel I have abundance in my life." I ask him my goofy question about him not being a billionaire and, by the look he gives me, prepare myself for a lesson. It depends on how we measure wealth, he says. "Look at beauty, not money and fame. If you look for beauty, you'll see beauty." He explains his job security this way: "Live music will never die. People need musicians to charge the air. It's like rain."

Hokkanen is remarkably casual about getting the word out about where people can go hear him. He suggests checking The Austin Chronicle listings and gig announcements on KUT-FM. I protest this is not enough. "What's wrong with being accessible? I'm in the book," he says. Hokkanen has no web site per se, but "hangs a cyber shingle" from Mark Rubin's web site. Rubin had played with Hokkanen and Rubin's former Bad Livers bandmate Danny Barnes as part of the Mad Cat Trio, and currently plays with The Ridgetop Syncopators, Rubinchik's Yiddish Ensemble, and other groups galore.

And where can we buy Hokkanen's stuff? "Waterloo (Records). And my live performances." Oh man, one of our Austin treasures is selling his handspun gold from the trunk of his car.

It's 8:30pm on the first Saturday in March in an almost full Flip's Satellite Café. I watch a dad named Robert and his daughter Zöe sit one table away from Erik Hokkanen, with Terry Hale on upright bass. Zöe, who looks to be about five years old, just started violin lessons. Robert tells me that they are here for Zöe's little brother's first birthday. He tells me that they were just leaving. He and Zöe will stay for four more songs, some of them Cajun, one of which is an extended version of "Summertime," bustin' out all over with reverie, nuance and melancholy. The set list veers all over the place and sounds perfect: "Big Mamou," "Sally Good'un," "Corinna," "Take Five," "Take the 'A' Train." Erik grins as he reminds the crowd about the tip jar. "We don't hold out on you," he says, "so don't you hold out on us."

Jeanine Christensen listens often to Erik Hokkanen's music to keep the blues away, warming her tired brain by the fire of tunes made on wood and string. You may e-mail Jeanine at jschristensen@goodlifemag.com.

Erik Hokkanen Discography
Erik and the Offbeats (1987)
Blue Corn (1989)
Erik & Erik (1992)
Earth Swing (1994)
Kaustinen Texas (1995)
Swing the Night Away (1996)
Barnes, Hokkanen and Rubin: Mad Cat Trio (1998)
Scout Fiddle Blues: Souvenir Album (1999)
In the Heart of a Waking Dream (2002)
Erik and the She Wolves (2003)
Hip Replacements (2003)

-Jeanine Sih Christensen