Mar 30, 2026 10:30 PM
Flea Finds His Jazz Thing
In the relatively small pantheon of certifiable rock stars venturing into the intersection of pop music and jazz, the…
Cellist Erik Friedlander will release an album insipred by American roots music, his own history as a young guitar player and the open road.
Block Ice & Propane (Skipstone Records) is a throwback to Friedlander’s childhood traveling across the United States with his family in the ‘60s and ‘70s. His father, the photographer Lee Friedlander, would plan journeys around his work and some of his photographs from that time figure in the CD’s packaging.
“Our camper was a thin shelled box sitting on top of a 1966 Chevrolet pickup truck,” Friedlander said in a news release. “Cities, campgrounds, parades, outhouses, wild animals and strange characters suffused in a haze of thousands of hours of highway travel. Writing these pieces put me back in that camper.”
Friedlander’s work on Block Ice, set for release Aug. 14, opened up when he noticed that his first sketches for the project were like finger-picking guitar pieces for the cello. A longtime veteren of New York’s downtown scene, Friedlander has backed John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Courtney Love and the Mountain Goats.
For more information, see www.blockiceandpropane.com.
“Cerebral and academic thought is a different way to approach music,” Flea says of his continuing dive into jazz. “I’ve always relied on emotion and intuition and physicality.”
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