“People often tell me that the cello is their favorite instrument,” Erik Friedlander laments, “and that can be a curse. It puts the cello in the category of the most beautiful instrument, which takes away its ability to be a bit nasty. I feel hemmed in by that. I don’t want to lose the beautiful part, but I want to make choices in whichever direction I want, both in playing and composing.”
Friedlander is one of the leading cellists in jazz today—a narrow niche, to be sure, but one that is growing every year. Friedlander, Tomeka Reid, Akua Dixon, Hank Roberts, Diedre Murray, David Darling, David Eyges, Mark Summer, Ernst Reijseger, Eugene Freisen, Muneer Fennell, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Zela Terry, Tom Cora, and Stephan Braun are all carving out a space in improvised music for an instrument tightly tied to European art music. These contemporary musicians are building on the pioneering efforts of cellists such as Oscar Pettiford, Fred Katz, Abdul Wadud, Ron Carter, Eileen Folson, Calo Scott, Charles McCracken, Joel Freedman, and Harry Babasin.
All these artists have had to struggle with the dilemma that Friedlander articulates: How do you expand the sounds produced by this instrument, so closely associated with chamber music, to meet the demands of jazz? How can you adapt its famous legato phrasing to create the syncopated rhythms and percussive accents that swing requires? How do you liberate the cello from the notated score so it can solo? How can you get it to make the harsh and discordant noises
