He is a bit of a puzzle to patrons of the Waterloo market who sometimes see him busking and selling his CD on Saturday mornings - a young, fresh-faced Caucasian man playing Chinese music at a Mennonite market on an instrument that looks like a half a coconut with a spike shoved through it.

The fiddle Jeremy Moyer plays is, in fact, essentially a half a coconut with a spike shoved through it, and you won't find it among the instruments down at the conservatory. Moyer travelled half-way around the world to learn to play the coconut shell fiddle and released a CD when he came home, he says, partly because he never wanted to forget the songs he learned there.

The music on Moyer's CD, A Discovery of Chinese Folk Tunes, has been passed down orally through the generations and is now played mostly by old men in Taiwan and mainland China. The songs he's preserved - songs like Madly in Love, Meng Jiang Mourns Her Lost Husband, Endless Hostility, and Happiness and Good Cheer - aren't even played that often in their countries of origin anymore. Moyer says they are considered coarse, unrefined, vestiges of a barbaric feudal era most modern Chinese would rather forget.

But when Moyer first heard the music, while he was volunteering at a school for blind children in Taiwan in 1991, he knew there was something really special about it. That year and on a subsequent trip to mainland China in 1993, he took lessons on the erhu fiddle, the coconut shell fiddle's conservatory cousin, before he learned the folk variety on the streets of Taiwan last year.

"On one hand I wanted to learn this music because it's so rare," Moyer says. "But it's also very beautiful in its pure form. The melody sings itself over and over. I really like the way a lot of the older men I learned to play from think about music. They think about memory, about having a repertory of songs. It's important that they play accurately and with feeling, but they aren't primarily concerned with technique.

"What I found so beautiful was that the song, not the player, was the main thing. And there's a certain rawness to it that a lot of young people find really appealing."

Lovers of folk music can find Moyer's CD locally at Encore Records, Dr. Disc, 10,000 Villages, the Lai Lai Restarurant, and HMV or you can buy one directly from him by calling 884-5866.