Ness Zolan plays the violin on his roof. (Benjamin R. Freed)

About 7:30 p.m. Sunday evening, passersby and shoppers exiting the Harris Teeter supermarket at 1631 Kalorama Road NW stopped to gawk at an unexpected musical performance. DCist happened to be doing some food buying of its own, and happened upon the impromptu set by Ness Zolan, who lives in a house across the street from the grocery store.

Zolan, who works at the Kennedy Center, played a short composition of his own making called “Venturous Tamalpais” while standing on the roof of his cyan-bricked row house. All of a sudden, the Sunday-night rush of people stocking up on their weekly comestibles took on an old-world vibe. Zolan’s violin warbled as people marveled at the sight of him.

In a street-to-rooftop interview and a subsequent email, Zolan, who at first simply identified himself as a “fiddler on the roof,” told DCist that a few weeks ago, when the weather turned, his roommate put him up to the stunt. “My roommate and I were people watching from the roof, and it was actually his idea to have me grab my violin,” he says.

But the response has only been kind, Zolan says, and he plans to continue the end-of-weekend performances through the summer. “I’ll be up there every Sunday evening as the sun is setting,” he says.

All one needs to do to catch Zolan’s next performance, then, is to schedule one’s grocery shopping around the celestial almanac.