Dirty Cello’s Roudman plays rock, jazz and blues

The cello has had an honored place in Western classical music for several hundred years, but who thinks of it as a cool pop instrument? Compare the cello to the acoustic bass — also known as the double bass, the contra-bass and the “stand-up bass” — which has epitomized “cool” ever since someone started playing it as a rhythm instrument around the 1920s. Or the violin — colloquially known outside the classical world as the “fiddle” — which has been a hot pop instrument for generations and continues to reign in country, bluegrass and progressive rock.

Rebecca Roudman, founder and lead vocalist of Dirty Cello, is bringing her instrument into the pop music spotlight.

“We’re a blues and rock band with a little sprinkling of bluegrass thrown in — we like to do stuff that’s different,” Roudman said last Friday, in a call from her San Francisco Bay Area home. Roudman and the rest of the group will perform at Blue Note Hawaii on Wednesday. (They play tomorrow at the Kukuau Studio in Hilo, Sunday with the Kona Chamber Orchestra in Kona, and Tuesday at the Volcano Art Center).

Roudman promises it will be 100 percent.

“We’re going to be playing high energy originals and do everything from Led Zeppelin (songs) that I don’t think a lot of fans have heard yet to the Scorpions,” Roudman said, explaining, “Our group is so weird in that there’s a cello lead instrument that we like to give the audience a little of what they know, so they can understand what’s going on.”

And so, fans can expect to hear “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” with the original lyrics, and a version of Nancy Sinatra’s 1966 break-through hit, “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” that Roudman says the group can’t put on YouTube “because I add my own little story to it.” She’s promising “the full grown up words” at the Blue Note.

Songs by Jimi Hendrix (“Purple Haze”), George Gershwin (“Summertime”), Dolly Parton (“Jolene”), Stevie Ray Vaughan (“House Is A Rockin’”) and Robert Johnson (“Crossroads”) could be in the set list too.

“We like to play pieces that really appeal to a wide audience and (also) appeal to us,” Roudman said. “I think it’s kind of fun to go to a concert where you don’t know what the next piece will be, because one minute you will be hearing Gershwin and the next you’ll be hearing Guns N’ Roses.”

Hawaii can count itself a little ahead of the curve in recognizing the pop potential of the cello thanks to the success of Streetlight Cadence and its cellist, Brian Webb, who went from street corner performers to two-time Na Hoku Hanohano Award winners (Best Alternative Album, 2015, 2016).

Looking outside Hawaii, a surprising number of acts have hired cellists to play on specific projects, but the groups that include cello as a full-time instrument is much shorter. It is also very eclectic, including Finnish rockers Apocalyptica, a cello trio specializing in the music of Metallica; Von Cello, a cello-fronted power rock trio; Goth rockers Rasputina; the cello/vocal septet Massive Violins and Break of Reality, both of which mix classical music with metal and modern rock.

Roudman started studying cello in its traditional classical context and she has played with traditional symphony orchestras. The origin story for Dirty Cello goes back to when she got to college and began experimenting.

“I like classical music but it’s never been my first love of music,” she said. “I pretty much loved blues and bluegrass and rock, and I even love hip-hop, and when I got into college I just started playing with singer/songwriters just to get a glimpse of what it was like to be in a different kind of band — and I liked it. I had a lot of fun, and I thought ‘What would it be like to be the front person in something like this?’”

Several years later, a college graduate and working classical cellist, Roudman decided it was time to find out.

She started by working as a duo with guitarist Jason Eckl, playing for tips in cafes and little restaurants “trying out playing blues and blue grass and rock and seeing if people liked it. We kept going and then six international tours later (and) sold out shows all over the country. We felt like we had landed on something really good.”

The group took its name from Roudman’s feeling that classical music was “a clean way to play” and by playing non-classical music they were going for the opposite.

As the venues got larger, Roudman found that putting a microphone in front of a standard acoustic cello didn’t get her the volume she needed. She experimented with the electric solid-body cello seen in some of the group’s YouTube videos but now uses a Luis and Clark carbon fiber acoustic instrument (“nice and light, and kind of indestructible”) that can be played as a traditional cello or “plugged in” like an electric guitar.

With their performance in Waikiki still a few days off, Roudman said that fans can send requests to the group on social media or to dirtycello.com. “If people have requests ask if we can play it — a lot of times we can.”

“We also have a lot of crazy stories to share. Everything from performing in China in these giant classical concert halls where we’re playing rock music, to being in Germany and playing for a bunch of drunken German fans. We have a lot of stories you wouldn’t think of because the cello is involved — like flying with it on a plane, and they locked it it the bathroom. Things like that.”