As a child, the cellist Erik Friedlander spent his summers on the open road. The family would blaze west from its Rockland County home in a 1966 Chevrolet pickup truck, a sturdy machine rigged with a camper top that fit over the vehicle’s bed. That’s where Mr. Friedlander and his younger sister would spend these marathon drives. They’d watch the countryside roll by from their perch above the cab’s roof, dreaming along endless gray ribbons of highway.

“I don’t know where it started that he wanted to travel,” Mr. Friedlander said of his father, the master photographer Lee Friedlander, whose journeys became occasions for commercial and artistic enterprise. “He was road crazy. He would get assignments from magazines to go and photograph the rattlesnake roundup in Oklahoma or some singer in the Midwest.”

Now 46, the younger Friedlander is a highly regarded musician whose work blurs genre definition. His journeyman instincts have led him to Broadway gigs and a memorable MTV Unplugged session backing up Courtney Love and her group, Hole (“nice group of folks,” he says, “a little like a shotgun marriage.”) But he’s best known for his role in John Zorn’s multiple Masada ensembles, and for his two decades as one of the leading string players on the downtown New York jazz-and-improvisation scene (a mildly ironic distinction since Mr. Friedlander was an Upper West Side resident until 1989).

But where many of his best-known projects have been collaborative, his latest is strictly personal. “Block Ice & Propane,” released on the musician’s own Skiptone label, is a cycle of solo cello pieces that reflects on those summers of yore in the family camper. The title alludes to the elemental resources of low-budget travel: block ice to keep groceries cool (if soggy) and propane gas to cook them.

“Can you even get block ice anymore?” Mr. Friedlander asked, mopping up some stray egg yolk on his breakfast plate at the Landmark diner in SoHo, near his apartment, as an air conditioner rattled and waitresses shouted.

The album’s idea of Americana isn’t limited to Mr. Friedlander’s succinct yet evocative titles: “Cold Chicken,” “Airstream Envy,” “Pressure Cooking.” It also extends to matters of technique. Back in 2005, Mr. Friedlander had been working a lot in a pizzicato style and became more interested in finger-picking his cello strings. Many tracks on “Block Ice,” such as the opening “King Rig,” draw on the example of the avant-garde guitarist John Fahey, for instance, and faint folk echoes of selections from Harry Smith’s “The Anthology of American Folk Music,” which Mr. Friedlander consulted for inspiration.

“Once I started going in this roots direction, the other stuff started coming in,” he said, recounting a kind of Proustian moment in the studio. “I remember being in the camper, the vibrations above the cab. Every song puts me in the zone of being in that vibrating.” The performer found it was natural to relate this musically. “It’s like the open sounds ringing like a banjo,” he said. “Listening to Fahey, there’s something about that guitar, sterling with those steel strings ringing. The cello can never do that but it can do its own thing. It’s moody.”

“Block Ice” veers across a full horizon of those shadings. Several tracks, such as the turbulent “A Thousand Unpieced Suns,” were improvised live in the studio, using electronic manipulation to create multiple voicings. Mr. Friedlander brought along selections from novels by William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, among others, whose texts supplied cues for texture and tone. The strategy gave the recordings an unpredictable range, allowing Mr. Friedlander to show off his nimble extended chops, and offering contrast to more plaintive, bucolic fare. Happily, listeners will have the chance to witness those chops up close when Mr. Friedlander performs at Joe’s Pub tomorrow night to mark the release of “Block Ice & Propane.”

Mr. Friedlander, who did not take up music seriously until he was an undergraduate at Columbia University, doesn’t make too much of his father’s influence. As jazz and photography fans know, the elder Friedlander has made jazz and rhythm-and-blues musicians some of his best-loved subjects, and shot a run of classic album covers for Atlantic Records in the 1960s. But even as a child, Erik was saturated in sound — especially on those road trips. It’s a memory that even blown-out shock absorbers can’t shake loose.

“In front of the truck was a big stereo with two speakers and a tape deck,” Mr. Friedlander said, noting his father’s obsessive love of jazz and especially R&B, which prompted some automotive design innovations. “And he would just slam in these 120-minute tapes. He was like a DJ. He’d make these collections from his records. It was so loud. The cab noise. There was no air conditioning, so the windows were open. It was like a command center. He had two giant gas tanks that he retrofitted, so you could fill up with 70 gallons of gas. It was always mysterious: How much did we have left?”

Mr. Friedlander performs tomorrow night at Joe’s Pub (425 Lafayette St., between East 4th Street and Astor Place, 212-967-7555).