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.

That’s also a pretty apt description of Mr. Friedlander’s current career. His grab bag of influences — from klezmer to rock and Americana — makes listening to Mr. Friedlander’s music always an eye-opening adventure, an opportunity to hear a classically trained, technically spot-on musician not only break definitions of what a cellist can do but create new ones with each album he produces.

Take last summer’s “Block Ice and Propane,” the wholly refreshing set of cello improvisations Mr. Friedlander will certainly draw from in his solo show at new-music venue Roulette this Friday. Inspired by the aforementioned road trips, “Block Ice” started somewhat accidentally.

“My first instrument was guitar, and I wanted to bring this guitar-playing technique, which I always kind of had a knack for with the cello, but I’d never actually used it for anything,” Mr. Friedlander said. “So I thought, ‘Well, what kind of music would come out if I did that?’ And it started sounding like Americana, roots, and as I started working on it, these memories started coming back to me about the trips.”

In the album’s simple, backporch pizzicato and rollicking lines, it’s easy to envision Mr. Friedlander and his sister riding on the top cab of the family mobile home, looking out the picture window, seeing and feeling what Mr. Friedlander calls “that vibrating, strangely anonymous thing, passing through people’s lives.”

Mr. Friedlander’s training is that of a classical cellist, but unlike many avant-garde musicians, he doesn’t scoff at the classical realm. “That part of my training really helped me in terms of general musicianship, bringing skills to everything I wanted to do,” Mr. Friedlander said.

He didn’t have many role models to look to in terms of experimental cellists, only a handful of innovators such as Oscar Pettiford, the bassist who, after breaking his arm, strung up a cello, and tuned it like a bass. Mr. Pettiford, in fact, is the inspiration for one of Mr. Friedlander’s current groups, the Broken Arm Trio.

But Mr. Friedlander’s momentum changed in the late ’80s, when he became a regular player on the downtown scene. He had noticed a string trio called Arcado at the Knitting Factory. “It wasn’t bluegrass or swing, or anything where violins fit easily — it was this new, hard-edged, modern improvised music with a lot of ambitions compositionally,” Mr. Friedlander recalled. “It made me think, you know, there’s a lot possible here for me.”

Soon enough, the god of the downtown scene, multi-instrumentalist and maverick composer John Zorn, noticed Mr. Friedlander and added him to his core group of players. Mr. Friedlander now plays with Mr. Zorn’s klezmer-influenced Masada String Trio and Bar Kokhba Sextet, and has worked with Mr. Zorn on solo projects and soundtracks as well.

“I brought a lot of technical can-do and an open mind, and I think it was exciting for him to see there wasn’t too much I couldn’t do,” Mr. Friedlander said. “Anyone who works for him is expected to be able to read anything, transpose it, put it in a different clef. I can do the chameleon thing, and it was a good match for him.”

It’s difficult to imagine how Mr. Friedlander keeps his schedule straight these days; aside from the various Zorn-related projects, he’s just completed a Broken Arm Trio record, is working on a commission for the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, and is playing solo shows like tonight’s at Roulette. And then there are the free lessons he’s offering through his Web site — so unexpectedly popular that he’s extended them beyond fully booked July. “Now people are calling who don’t even have a cello!” Mr. Friedlander said. “This isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”