“Anybody out here would have done the same thing,” said the driver, Mohammed Khalil, waving a hand at his laughing, dancing colleagues. The city of Newark awarded Khalil, who has driven a taxi here since 1985, a Medallion, its highest honor. Quint gave him a $100 tip when the violin was returned, but he wanted to do more, so he arranged for Tuesday’s concert in a parking-lot-turned-theater.

Clad in black, with his dark hair falling over his closed eyes, Quint dazzled the crowd with a theme from the movie “The Red Violin”; Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So”; a Paganini Variation; and the Meditation from Massenet’s opera “Thais”. Joined by his friend Michael Bacon, a guitarist (and the brother of the actor Kevin Bacon), Quint played a piece they had composed, “Seduction Blues”.

Occasionally, a silhouetted plane would glide by overhead, providing a rumbling accompaniment to the music. Despite that, Quint’s audience seemed moved by his gesture. “I like that he came here. And, yeah, the music, I like it ,” Ebenezer Sarpeh, 46, said as she burst into spontaneous applause on occasions yelling “magic fingers”.

Afterward, Quint posed for photographs with Khalil, who gave him a ride noticing he was in no condition to go home by himself. He said Khalil told him, “‘Why don’t I give you a ride home?’ I said, ‘No, no, it’s OK, I’ll take a bus, I’ll take another taxi. He said, ‘No, I’m happy to give you a ride back, because you're my last customer.’” As he had planned for months, Khalil retired from driving a cab the day he took Quint home.