When he was 13, Mark O’Connor had a strong and straight back. But at one of his concerts, his mother noticed the young O’Connor was moving awkwardly, as if his back were in pain.

“Actually, I was holding my back like Benny Thomasson, my teacher,” said O’Connor last week. “I really wanted to be my teacher. I wanted to be like he was. So I moved like he did. He was in his 70s at the time, and he had a bad back. I suppose what I was doing was psycho imitative.”

Thomasson, the legendary Texas fiddler and innovator, was not only O’Connor’s teacher. He was also his mentor. “A mentor creates a pathway for other people to navigate,” said O’Connor, and Thomasson surely helped O’Connor navigate his way into a major music career.

These days, O’Connor, who is 44, has taken on the role of mentor, too. He regularly teaches master classes at leading music schools, and founded an annual fiddle camp in Tennessee as well as a string conference near San Diego.

But O’Connor is best known in the music world as a virtuoso fiddler. Actually, it’s music worlds. Driven as an artist, O’Connor has the rare distinction of being both a bluegrass fiddler and classical music violinist. In more recent years, he has also combined talents with his Hot Swing Trio on the jazz circuit. The group will perform Feb. 2 at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono.

“Nothing is ever black and white with my career or with my audiences,” said O’Connor, who is as comfortable being commissioned to write a concerto for violin and orchestra as he is performing a dizzying riff for “The Orange Blossom Special.” “Early on, what interested me about violin music is the history of it, which is extensive – 500 years of literature. The second thing was the incredible variety one instrument can produce. Those paradigms captivated me. They still do.”

O’Connor grew up in a Seattle household that favored classical music. His talents, recognized first at regional and national fiddle competitions, were lauded on the bluegrass circuit, and later at Carnegie Hall with French jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli, and with the Atlanta ’70s jazz-rock band Dixie Dregs. His resume hops from Dolly Parton to Yo-Yo Ma, from Emmylou Harris to Renee Fleming, from Nashville to National Public Radio. In 2000, O’Connor’s “Appalachian Journey” won a Grammy Award for best classical crossover album. One reviewer described the work as “Aaron Copland meets Bill Monroe, with a little Vivaldi tossed in.”

A few months ago, O’Connor moved from California to New York City, where the Hot Swing Band was featured last week in Dizzy’s Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center. “It’s beautiful,” said O’Connor of the city’s premier jazz complex at the southern edge of Central Park. “Nothing has ever been like it for jazz music.”

Relocating to New York, he said, has put him in closer proximity to the music scenes in which he has become a vocal and prolific player. Finally, his breadth is matched by an external smorgasbord of musicians, studios, venues and audiences.

“The age of specialization is the era I grew up in,” said O’Connor. “I really fought that. The beauty of a lot of American music is the result of cross-pollination.”

So does he call himself a fiddler or a violinist?

“Both,” he said.

For O’Connor, that’s the only answer.

Mark O’Connor’s Hot Swing Trio will perform at 7 p.m. Feb. 2 at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono. For tickets, call 581-1755 or (800) MCA-TIXX, or visit www.mainecenterforthearts.org. Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.