Daniel Pearl on fiddle with Todd Mack, the organizer of Friends of Daniel Pearl. Photo: courtesy/Todd Mack

Friends of Daniel Pearl — more a happening than a musical group — performs Saturday at the Candler Park Fall Fest, for which I happen to be doing pro bono PR work. I wrote the following remembrance of Danny, who was a nice guy and a journalistic colleague in Atlanta in the early ’90s. This piece also appears in a guide to the Fall Fest published in the print edition of the The Sunday Paper.

I remember him as a warm smile on a lanky body, framed by a doorway. I wasn’t the only person who thought you could see in his eyes that he was happy to meet you.

Daniel Pearl was a friend of a friend, another young Atlanta journalist. He was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He also was a fine musician — the fiddler in Ottoman Empire, a great, local alt-country band in the early 1990s. Then, he left Atlanta and worked his way up at Journal. He became a rising star among the paper’s foreign correspondents.

If you’d met Danny, though, the thing you’d remember would be his kind and open bearing. He greeted the world with kindness.

Then, in 2002, the world met Danny in the most tragic fashion. While reporting on religious extremists in Pakistan, he was kidnapped and murdered. For being a reporter. For being American. For being Jewish. For the sake of hatred.

But hatred lost its war against Daniel Pearl. Pearl’s parents and his wife founded the Daniel Pearl Foundation. It seeks to build cross-cultural understanding by offering fellowships to journalists in the Muslim world and — in the early days of every October — by spreading the unifying message of music. (Check out the foundation’s story at www.danielpearl.org. It’s downright inspirational.)

On what would have been Danny’s 46th birthday, Daniel Pearl World Music Days is coming this year to Candler Park Fall Fest. Friends of Daniel Pearl, a traveling musical festival will perform at 3:30 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 10, on the Fall Fest stage.

At it turns out, the performance will be something of a homecoming. Pearl practiced and jammed in Candler Park during his time in Atlanta. So many of his old friends will join with other musicians who didn’t even know him onstage for the Fall Fest performance.

Happy birthday, Danny.

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