The Music of the Open Road

Take a child on yearly summer road trips of between 300 and 400 miles a day, accompanied by enough Charlie Parker, Wilson Pickett, and Aretha Franklin to match, and what do you get? In Erik Friedlander’s case, the downtown music scene’s premier cellist. Mr. Friedlander was taken on the road trips by his father, the famed photographer Lee Friedlander. “My father played music loud, and he was also kind of a mixologist,” the younger Mr. Friedlander recalled. A mélange of music, preserved on his dad’s numerous mix tapes, permeated his childhood. “It was a big mess of stuff all the time,” Mr. Friedlander said.