Upright Citizen

Erik Friedlander makes room for cello in the jazz trio.


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Published: Mar 24, 2009

TAKE A BOW: Friedlander puts the unlikely cello at the center of his Broken Arm Trio.

In 1949, bassist Oscar Pettiford suffered a broken arm while playing baseball. Not to be deterred from playing, he borrowed a friend's cello, tuned it like a double bass, and continued to perform with his arm in a sling. Thus began a love affair with the instrument that lasted throughout the final decade of Pettiford's life — he played the cello onstage with Woody Herman's band throughout 1949, began recording with it the following year, and later even named his son Cello.

Decades later, when cellist Erik Friedlander began turning his attention to playing jazz and improvised music, mentors were hard to come by. Of the few cellists in the genre — Ron Carter, Ray Brown (both better known as bassists), Fred Katz, Abdul Wadud — it was Pettiford who captured Friedlander's imagination. "I was captivated by his sound and his time," Friedlander says. "That's always been an inspiration for me."

Despite the relative scarcity of his chosen axe in jazz and experimental music, Friedlander was in a sense born into the music. His father is photographer Lee Friedlander, who shot the images that adorned many of Atlantic Records' jazz and R&B records in the '50s and '60s, including Coltrane's Giant Steps. Erik picked up the guitar while very young, but switched to cello in the third grade through a school program. At 19 he met bassist Harvie S, then playing in Stan Getz's attempt at an electric band, who enlisted the cellist for his own project.

"I was all of a sudden in a band with Randy Brecker and all these New York jazz players," Friedlander recalls. "It was the trigger that made me say I need to do this."

For the next decade, Friedlander mainly took freelance work with orchestras, Broadway shows and commercial houses. But the music that attracted him was the avant-garde jazz and creative music of the Downtown scene, which forced him to reevaluate his own playing. "It became evident to me that if I was going to play the music I was listening to at the Knitting Factory, I needed to break down and rebuild my technique. These guys were steeped in jazz. They knew how to play over changes. Whether they were doing exactly that in the music they were writing as modern composers, it was clear that you needed to have some kind of basis in rigorous jazz harmony if you were going to be a part of the scene."

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His first break came with trumpeter Dave Douglas' String Group. Soon after he began working with sax iconoclast John Zorn, an association that continues to this day; Friedlander's performance of a solo piece from the composer's Masada songbook was the highlight of last year's Zorn-centered radical Jewish Music Festival in Philly.

Over the years, Friedlander continually played with the idea of paying tribute to his jazz cello forebears, transcribing tunes or considering pieces by a variety of those inspirations to form a project around, but none of them ever came to fruition. In recent years, however, he began concentrating more on pizzicato playing for various other projects, and his thoughts returned to Pettiford. Instead of rehashing the original tunes, he began writing new pieces in the spirit of those recordings, which became the basis for his new Broken Arm Trio.

"I wondered what it would be like to take the cello and stick it into that archetypal unit — the piano trio in jazz — and just see if it can work," Friedlander explains. He modeled the group — for which he recruited bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Mike Sarin, both busy players on the New York scene — both on Pettiford's upbeat sound and the small-group dynamics of pianist Herbie Nichols' trio. "I love that trio stuff that has this kind of organic interplay. All the famous trios have it, but there was something small-scale about the Herbie Nichols Trio, really light on its feet."

The Broken Arm Trio's self-titled debut captures well that sense, refracted through Friedlander's modern prism. While the cellist's tunes could never be confused for bebop, they do possess a bop energy and enthusiasm, a lift that seems to propel the music from within. "Evidently he wasn't a real optimistic guy," Friedlander says of Pettiford, "but his music is really buoyant and has a lightness and drive that's kind of wonderful."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Broken Arm Trio plays Thu., March 26, 8 p.m., $12, Philadelphia Art Alliance, 251 S. 18th St., 866-468-7619, arsnovaworkshop.com.