By Josef Woodard | Published July 2022
Chalk one up for the jazz cello cause. Erik Friedlander, as sideman and leader/composer, is a significant player in the still sparsely populated field of cellists working in jazz, new music and pop, and one with his own musical mission at hand.
The latest album from his band — a formidable outfit with pianist Uri Caine, bassist Mark Helias and young drummer Ches Smith — finds Friedlander doing a wary and sometimes dizzy dance between gently accessible musical matters and the more challenging turf we might expect of this downtown New York scene-maker.
A Queens’ Firefly is an album of sharp contrast, as when the affable, easy-on-the-ears title cut opens the album, but takes a left turn into the spiky angularity of “Match Strikes.” With “Glimmer,” we can detect a touch of Chick Corea-esque phraseology in the melody line.
For this project, Friedlander has quoted and lifted song titles from a quote from Virginia Woolf’s innovative, landmark novel To the Lighthouse, celebrating the “little daily miracles” and the profundity to be savored in the everyday. Sometimes, however, the breezy pleasantry of a tune — including “Little Daily Miracles” — feels at odds with the structure-mutating proto-modernism of Woolf’s prose.
It seems a bit disarming to hear such soft-sell lyricism from this quartet, made up of players known for adventurous and edgy music. But that edgier aspect of their spectrum is duly flexed and revealed in the tune “Aurora,” which starts out in freely improvised mode before settling into one of Friedlander’s organically progressive metric structures.
On the metrically complex closer “The Fire In You,” we get hints of an influence from Corea and his Return to Forever unison riff-slinging, but with an all-acoustic menu and the distinctive timbre of cello gamely leading the charge.
A Queens’ Firefly: A Queens’ Firefly; Match Strikes; Chandelier; Glimmer; Little Daily Miracles; Aurora; A Simple Radiance; The Fire In You. (39:11)
Personnel: Erik Friedlander, cello; Uri Caine, piano; Mark Helias, bass; Ches Smith, drums
Ordering Info: erikfriedlander.com
