Cello and Context

photo: Emiliano Neri

Chanced to catch Erik Friedlander doing his solo cello thing last week in Philly. Wow. Just finished watching his new solo cello documentary DVD. Wow again. Besides the rapturous music, the gig reinforced some thoughts I keep returning to about the entire culture of live music performance, a topic I can spew endless bile about. But this is a happy story, an example of how things ought to be more often. Let's see, solo cello performance—what kind of audience do you get for that? 500? 100? 50? Ah, we're getting warmer. Doesn't matter what kind of music we're talking about or whether it's a prominent master musician like Friedlander whose music is so rich and deep that it leaves both avant-garde and non-avant-garde listeners with a warm glow in their hearts—the fact is that people don't swarm to gigs like that. But who are these "people" anyway? Well, I'm talking about the hundreds of anonymous youngish folks who reliably show up for pedestrian rock acts pretty much any day of the week in cities across America. It pleases me to report that Friedlander got to present his art to such folks last week, one in a string of five East Coast gigs he did as an opening act for a long-running acoustic pop duo called The Mountain Goats, having figured largely into their recent album as a session player.

Standing by the side of the stage, I could not only hear the soft details in Friedlander's astonishing virtuosity, but also take in some revealing visual details. First—a very unpretentious man in blue jeans and white t-shirt seated with a cello and a partially emptied beer bottle at his feet. That's it. A man and his instrument, taking his art on the road in the grand tradition of the gigging musician. It was poetic in its simplicity. Second—smiling, rapt young people (late teens, early 20s) standing right up against the stage. Listening. Complex and intellectual, but also visceral and immediate, it was the kind of music that could easily set one of those kids onto a different path. I'd reckon the audience numbered at least 150 that night and it's quite rare I attend any kind of show without bumping into some friends or acquaintances, but I don't recall any familiar faces, curiously not a single person from the usual crowd of avant-jazz fans I'm accustomed to from Philly's great long-running Ars Nova Workshop series, where Friedlander is a familiar performer. It was a whole different scene. Incidentally, it was a typical example of the consistent and prolific concert promotion by r5 Productions, a fabulous, grass-roots DIY organization that's been sidestepping the disgusting Clear Channel socio-economic monoculture of popular music (punk, rock, hip-hop, etc) presentation for quite a few years with an emphasis on all-ages admittance, and the venue was a spacious church basement in the bustling center of the city, a really comfortable space where I've enjoyed a handful of avant-rock gigs over the years.

This is the kind of genre-mixing in concert production that I wish were the norm, instead of the depressing and ubiquitous scenarios where you face a night of monotony hearing a handful of similar-sounding rock bands—typically one good band and a few disposable wannabes—or you see one or two sets by a jazz group, a wasted opportunity to present short sets by local improvisors or maybe a recital by someone who's been working hard to master a piece of experimental notated music. There's a reasonable amount of thoughtful, creative rock music in the world these days, even if weeding through the morass is too daunting for most sane people, myself included, and I believe there's a demographic of listeners who aren't inclined to attend typical improv gigs, but would welcome the contrast and stimulation of a short improv set sandwiched between creative rock groups. Everyone benefits from this kind of mingling between different scenes and aesthetics and it's a way to make a concert outing a memorable, unpredictable experience instead of a clinical consumption of familiar music. For improvisors like Erik Friedlander, and even more so for the lesser known, avant-garde segment of the improv world, this is a way to test fresh ears and expand beyond the insular, jaded improv scene. What's more, I think music simply sounds better when it's set off in stylistic or dynamic relief; I've seen mini-marathons of the same style of music where basic mental satiation attenuates the pleasure of the later performances, occasionally reducing a potentially transcendental set to an exercise in perceiving the qualities that would make it such. And contrastive, stylistically varied listening experiences are the norm in most serious music fans' private listening habits anyway, so it's only natural to present live music the same way.

Friedlander is the kind of classic creative music virtuoso who casts a spell on the listener, imbuing every gesture with precision, verve, and vivid musical logic, whether it's the spine-tingling warmth of thick, traditional tone and melody or the tension and excitement of violent or harsh extended techniques. It's just plain rare to see this level of musicianship, and I mean both the technical and creative dimensions. Friedlander's compositional style pivots around the sorts of fat grooves and exuberant melody you find in classic R&B, contextualized by the inevitable diversity in structure and mood of someone immersed in avant-garde jazz and classical music. My tastes generally run in favor of the scrapey, scratchy side of music and I'd be just as happy listening to Mark Wastell, Audrey Chen, Nikos Veliotis, Fred Longberg-Holm, Bob Marsh, etc, but Friedlander's music has the same deep appeal to me as traditional folk music from a distant culture. Or from an intimate, familiar culture as is closer to the truth here. When he announced he was going to do a piece from an obscure Abdul Wadud solo album from the 70s, besides the sobering thought that I was probably the only other person in the room who even owns a Wadud album (though sadly not the solo album he mentioned), something clicked for me. Abdul Wadud. Julius Hemphill. Tim Berne. Erik Friedlander. Everything made sense and I glimpsed some kind of untold aesthetic history underpinning my rapturous enjoyment of this solo cello music. Even though I dig the Zorn stuff and his Topaz and Chimera stuff as much as the next guy, my ears have been cocked in Friedlander's direction much more than usual since I saw him do a set of Tim Berne's music last fall in trio with Tom Rainey. You can't ask for a more perfect trio than that and Friedlander's playing that night was by far the most mind-blowing cello performance I've witnessed, his own musicality amplified a hundred-fold by Berne's inimitable compositions and Rainey's orgasmic drumkitting. Despite the instrumentation, that trio doesn't sound much at all like the classic Miniature stuff with Joey Baron and Hank Roberts, who sadly retired before my time; it's more like Hard Cell with Craig Taborn swapped for Friedlander, an equal exchange of players I'd say.

While I did see Ernst Reijseger do a solo set at Tonic quite a few years back that was equally impressive, Friedlander's solo recital was so incredible I had to check out his new DVD, Vanishing Point: A Road Journal, a straightforward documentary of his 2004 solo tour of North America. It wonderfully captures the music I saw last week and this stuff is well worthy of repeated listening. With the "on the road" imagery and mournful cello I quickly had a sentimental thought of the early Tom Cora segment in Step Across the Border, but even though the music itself is just as mind-blowing, Vanishing Point doesn't have anything like the breathtaking layers of visual artistry and historical, personal subtext of that landmark film. It's more like a solo album enhanced by concert footage and brief snippets of roadside imagery; the emphasis is on the music and fits Friedlander's no-nonsense, down-to-business approach to his craft. A man and his instrument. It's an ideal way to get totally immersed in his compositions and technique, letting the music create its own cinema. There's some clever editing for his avant-barnstormer "Here Comes the Madwoman", with four different performances seamlessly interwoven with each other, making for some especially fun viewing and highlighting the meticulously rehearsed and refined nature of these solo pieces.

I also loved the scene preceding the piece "Pig's Feet" with his father, Lee Friedlander, who travelled with him for part of the tour, taking great pleasure in ordering and eating some BBQ pig's feet from a roadside shack somewhere in rural America. Nutritious, delicious traditional food like pig's feet may have lost its place of honor in mainstream culture, but it will always pass the test of time and outlive the fads of our post-industrial society. The very same can be said for the kind of timeless, quintessentially human music that Erik Friedlander plays.

~Michael Anton Parker