Rebecca Roudman is the lead cellist of the rock band Dirty Cello. You read that correctly. Roudman plays the cello with the dexterity of a shredding lead guitarist, among other equally impressive styles.
It was a musically cavalier move that almost didn’t happen. “I was playing piano by six months old,” Roudman says from her home in Marin. “My mom’s a piano teacher and she asked me if I wanted to learn the harp. But turns out we didn’t have a big enough car, which is probably good, because otherwise you’d be talking to someone who plays in the band Dirty Harp.”
Roudman stops laughing and says with a softer voice, “But then, I heard the cello.”
Every type of artist is unique, each with their own quirks and personalities. And there are always outliers, but for most musicians it always starts with a love story between a person and an instrument. “From seven years old on, it was all about the cello,” says Roudman. Classically trained from elementary school through college, Roudman is a member of the Oakland East Bay Symphony and the Santa Rosa Symphony (her first time was with the Santa Cruz Symphony), and has toured the world.
If one thing is apparent about Roudman, besides being gifted musically, it’s that she is brave and honest. “There were a few things I really hated about being in an orchestra,” Roudman tees up. “One was that you’re in a section of cello players. I was one of eight cello players and we all had to play the exact same thing, the exact same way. In orchestras you have to dress a specific way, and it’s not the way you want to dress. You can’t have your ankle showing. You have to wear black clothing. With shirts that go all the way down to your wrists. A little bit stifling for me. I wanted to grow and not be doing what everybody else was doing—but I also didn’t believe that I could play rock on the cello.”
If you Wiki the cello, you realize its origin is Italian. Then you get bogged down in whether the cello is part of the viola da gamba family or the viola da brachia family, and it reads like a Mario Puzo novel. In order to understand the cello, you have to hear it. Then you can understand how a cello note can be a mournful, soulful, sexy sound that rips your heart chakra out of your chest.
Oddly, in order to evoke the sound, it involves rubbing horsehair over goat guts. So it’s no wonder that, from Apocalyptica (the Finnish metal cello band) to System of a Down, artists use the cello to express a certain kind of emotion. Roudman knew in her own gut that the cello held more gifts than what the symphony could provide.
“My husband (Jason Eckl), who’s the guitar player in Dirty Cello, is very supportive and he would always tell me, ‘Look, you can improvise. You just gotta start slow and go from there.’ And then I started doing it by listening to blues and rock guitar players. Slowly, I kind of grew my confidence and now it just feels like the most natural thing to improvise and play rock on the cello, whereas classical doesn’t feel as natural anymore,” Roudman says.
The cello has been around for more than 600 years, so you might think there would be some blowback from the symphonic world when “one of their own” escapes. “Weirdly enough, the classical world thinks that I’m cool. Where I actually get dissension is from the bluegrass community. They’re really offended that I’m bringing cello into the bluegrass world.
“There’s this one story at a bluegrass festival where this—I can’t mention his name—famous fiddler told me that I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing on the cello. I didn’t say too much. I got back in the car after the show and left. Well, his most famous song is “Orange Blossom Special.” And now, I play it at every concert,” Roudman proudly boasts.
Dirty Cello plays at 7:30pm on March 14 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. Tickets: $25. kuumbwajazz.org
