Inside Firehouse 12, a new sound came to an established musical genre: cello plus slide guitar.
Erik Friedlander had a hunch that the two would go together. He was proved right when recently his formed band Bonebridge played the cutting-edge Crown Street club Friday night.
Click on the play arrow for a sample, including a bow to southern rock.
The performance, and Friedlander’s tale of how the music came about, demonstrated how an art form can remain vibrant and develop from the continual search for new, far-flung ingredients.
Friedlander (pictured) started playing cello when he was 8. The son of photographer and artist Lee Friedlander, he grew up listening to the subjects of his father’s work, including musical greats like John Coltrane and Ray Charles.
He started out with classical training on the cello. “I was always kind of tried to follow my nose into other situations,” he said in an interview before his performance. In high school, he would bring in his cello to play soulful ballads for the rock band he played electric guitar in.
He remembered pulling into a huge bluegrass festival in Virginia during a childhood family trip, watching performers with their lap steel guitars. “It just captivated me,” he recalled.
It wasn’t until recently that Friedlander put two and two together. Stuck in a rut coming up with new music for a trio known as the Broken Arm Trio, he thought of the slide. “A lot of memories came back to me,” he said. And a lot of realizations.
“There’s a kind of camaraderie between the cello and the slide,” he remembered thinking. “They might have charisma and chemistry together. So then the music started to flow pretty easily once I got that going.”
Neena Satija Photo
So Friedlander brought in guitarist Doug Wamble (pictured) to join drummer Mike Sarin and bassist Trevor Dunn, turning the Broken Arm Trio into the quartet known as Bonebridge. Their self-titled album came out in June.
On Friday night, it was clear how easily Wamble’s guitar synced with the rest of the band — and encouraged Friedlander to try new ideas with his own instrument. As he and Wamble passed melodies back and forth, the cello began to sound less cello-like and more electric, more scorching.
“Compared to the slide, the cello is kind of innocent-sounding,” Friedlander explained. “I can’t really change that, but I kind of play with that because the slide sounds so sultry.”
“Bubbles” — a song Friedlander just wrote and introduced to the band on Friday — is a perfect example. The cello started out with a bouncing, cheerful tune. After Wamble repeated it with a more sizzling tone, Friedlander taked it back with extra bite.
“Sometimes I come across a name that works, and then later I figure out why,” Friedlander said, explaining how he came up with the title.