Erik Friedlander started playing the guitar at age six. Had he continued down that well-tread road, it seems unlikely that the artist would have enjoyed as aggressively diverse career as he has, with records running the gamut from the forefront of avant-garde jazz to straightforward classical, to collaborations with artists ranging from Courtney Love to Mike Patton to Johns Zorn and Darnielle. When asked what brought on such a dramatically life-altering decision, Friedlander answers, simply, “In third grade, they offered me the cello or violin. I guess they needed a cello—I don’t quite remember, but there it was.”
Friedlander’s father, Lee, played a slightly more tangible influence on his son’s musical development. A consummate lover of all things musical, the elder Friedlander was a professional photographer who carved out a niche for himself shooting, shooting up-and-coming artists for magazine articles, taking his family in tow.
“Every summer, until I was about 17, we’d take a trip in a camper,” says Friedlander. “It was long stretches and very intense family togetherness.”
Those trips, with the inevitable soundtrack of his father’s homemade cassette collection blaring from the front of the camper, also helped subconsciously coalesce Friedlander’s forthcoming record, Block Ice & Propane. “It was a lot the motion and the rhythm and the motion of the camper,” Friedlander explains. “It is an amazing thing to have experienced. It’s just in me, somehow. My wife tells me that when I’m happiest now is when I’m in a car, rolling down a highway somewhere. There’s something about it in my blood.”
July 17, Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. Astor Pl. & E. 4th St.), 212-967-7555; 7:30, $12.
