DIRTY CELLO

“We thought we would originally call it ‘Greatest Hits,’ but it sounded super pretentious,” Rebecca Roudman jokes about Dirty Cello’s “approximately” 13th album. Why they’re resorting to ballpark figures is a technical matter that pales next to the myriad achievements of the band itself.

The golden age of rock and roll lives on. Within the iconic surroundings of San Francisco, spearheaded by
virtuoso player Rebecca Roudman, the DIRTY CELLO ensemble reinvents roots music in a gloriously refreshing
way. Their combination of blues, rock and roll, and bluegrass is an utterly irresistible sonic cocktail, converting
listeners in their droves, a fanbase that now has dedicated cult followings all around the world.

Hi Rebecca, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking
Our current risk taking failure to success ratio is about 8 out of 10! My band Dirty Cello travels the world and makes a living playing our unique spin on blues, rock and Americana. Leading a band this unique, and making a living from it, has meant living in a world of risk-taking – and most of those risks pay off.

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Rebecca Roudman started playing the cello as a child growing up in Terra Linda, performed with the Marin Youth Orchestra, studied classical music in college, and is now a member of the Santa Rosa and Oakland symphonies.

All well and good. But being a successful classical musician wasn’t enough for her. Roudman wanted to shred, just like the baddest rock guitarists.

“I wanted to let my hair down and do something totally different from classical,” she says.

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Hi Rebecca, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
My name is Rebecca Roudman and I lead the semi-nomadic band, Dirty Cello. We call ourselves semi-nomadic since even though our home base is the San Francisco area, we perform all over the United States and all over the world. Recently we found ourselves in Denver/Lafayette for shows – cities we hadn’t visited in quite a while. 

Rebecca Roudman and her Dirty Cello band have performed at the Oakland Zoo, a California nudist camp and all over Iceland, but never at SOMO Village in Rohnert Park.

“This will be our first time,” Roudman said. “We’ve been wanting to do it. We want to perform in that beautiful redwood grove, and it’s the perfect time. People want to go out now.”

Combining virtuosic musicianship and a fiery taste for rock and roll, Marin-based ensemble Dirty Cello is renowned around the world for their energetic live shows and their remarkable ability to reinvent classical and modern music into a one-of-a-kind experience.

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The Novato, California-based Dirty Cello is one of those bands that you cannot prevent your toes from tapping and your head from bopping as they wail through their amazing repertoire. 

The unique Blues Americana rock band Dirty Cello has played in unusual venues across the globe, from a vacant fish factory to an American-themed festival in Iceland, the bottom of a cave and a nudist resort. Now, they’re coming to Sebastopol to play at HopMonk on March 11 and 12 in celebration of their new album, “Dirty Cello Smokes the 60s.”

Sometimes the only article of clothing you need to get into a Dirty Cello concert is a face covering. One of the group’s most memorable shows took place at a nudist resort in San Jose, band leader Rebecca Roudman revealed. “The audience dutifully kept their masks on, but nothing else,” Roudman said. “We kept our clothes on and found the whole experience to be beyond distracting, especially when the hula hoops came out and the dancing kicked up a notch.”

Dirty Cello frontwoman Rebecca Roudman says her shows go beyond the stereotypical concerts. They’re “experiences.”

“We don’t have a set set list,” said Roudman, who lives in San Francisco.

“The audience determines what we’re going to play. If they’re digging the blues, we’ll do more of that. Every show becomes a personal experience. We’ve been doing it since the inception of Dirty Cello. It makes it more fun for the audience and more fun for the band.”

When you think of the cello, you think classical. You think Yo-Yo Ma, Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. The band Dirty Cello is none of these. Dirty Cello is about fun, and that point is vital to lead singer and cellist Rebecca Roudman.

“The audience can expect high energy blues, rock and Americana,” said Roudman, “all in the format of an entirely unplanned set list that we evolve throughout the show.”

San Francisco-based Dirty Cello, which brings the world a high energy and unique spin on blues, rock, and Americana, performs at the Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena on Sunday, Feb. 20, starting at 7 p.m.

Led by vivacious cross-over cellist Rebecca Roudman and her husband Jason Eckl, Dirty Cello is cello like you’ve never heard before. From down-home blues and rock with a wailing cello, to virtuosic stompin’ Americana, Dirty Cello is a band that gets your heart thumping and your toes tapping.

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Novato-based band Dirty Cello has played virtually all of Marin’s music venues over the years, from Sweetwater Music Hall and the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley to stages at the county’s many summer outdoor concerts series. But the band, helmed by cellist Rebecca Roudman, who grew up in San Rafael, also has a reputation for playing its foot-stomping brand of blues, bluegrass and rock at far-flung international locales, as well as unconventional venues close to home.

If this doesn’t rock your boathouse, there’s a hole in your soul, er, make that hull.

Dirty Cello, an eclectic quintet with a worldwide reputation for virtuosic frolicsomeness, headlines Wednesday’s Valhalla’s Boathouse Theatre 25th Anniversary Celebration.

These difficult times have been very hard on musicians, and as the leader of the international touring band Dirty Cello, it’s been quite a struggle to keep rocking and rolling through the pandemic. But despite all the difficulties, my band and I have been doing lots of performing – all with safety at the forefront of our minds.

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Even given Berkeley’s reputation for hijinks, Rebecca Roudman is thrilled to be performing at the Back Room Saturday afternoon for an audience she expects will consist mostly of fully-clothed human beings.

For the cellist, fiddler, vocalist and leader of the San Francisco combo Dirty Cello, getting through the pandemic has meant working in situations where that’s not always the case. 

Dirty Cello’s livestream concert at the Kahilu Theatre last Saturday was a-rockin’ good time. In a way, it felt like we might be finally making our way back to some type of pre-pandemic normalcy. Sure, the seats are still empty, and the roar from a raucous crowd is missing, but having a mainland act return to the Big Island for a concert was reminiscent of the good ol’ days of nine months ago.

It’s a beautiful evening in Ashland as I enter the Bayberry Inn’s enchanting outdoor space on September 6 (pre-fires). Just as there is a certain insider acumen associated with the “dirty” martini, Southern Oregon presents Dirty Cello as an example of the higher echelon of musical talent. 

When Dirty Cello played at the B Street Theatre at The Sofia last (pre-COVID-19), I had tentatively planned to attend the mid-December 2019 concert.  Unfortunately, my plans were sidetracked.  I was therefore pleased to “attend” their recent virtual concert as part of the B Street Theatre at the Sofia’s Six-Feet Apart series.

Four years ago, Rebecca Roudman and husband Jason Eckl booked a night’s stay at a fully functioning buffalo ranch on California’s Central Coast. While there, the owner gave them a tour of the property. They noticed a beautiful outdoor stage that was used for church services. Roudman asked, “Would you consider having a concert here?”

Rebecca Roudman should be lugging her cello case down a cobblestone street in Paris this week, strolling through art galleries, and sipping cappuccino by the gallon.

The closure has had a major economic impact on the zoo but a Bay Area bluegrass band, Dirty Cello, has stepped in to help the animals during the pandemic.

Bake, read, learn, practice, maybe sing with Ken Jeong together Live…even when we’re apart. There’s tons of live content to bring us together on Facebook Watch.

To make a long story short, a bluegrass band named Dirty Cello was performing at the Oakland Zoo and a parrot decided to sing along. It made me so happy to be reminded that we still have so much room in our new normal for this kind of spontaneous joy. Hope it does the same for you.

Anyone who's been in an audience when the San Francisco Bay Area Dirty Cello takes the stage knows that something unique happens whenever cellist Rebecca Roudman and ensemble come face to face with living, breathing (and whooping and shouting) fans.

The elephant was not amused, the giraffe was intrigued, and the parrot burst into song.

Earlier this week a blues and bluegrass band, Dirty Cello, played music for all of the animals of the Oakland Zoo.

On Friday evening May 8, we’ll welcome back the one and only Dirty Cello, who have headlined for me on numerous occasions and are one of my very top crowd-pleasers. From the first time I nearly fell out of my chair when she emailed asking to play my series, to booking concert dates for her in the U.K., to attending her wedding, to playing pack-mule schlepping her gear to the bottom of Moaning Cavern for a concert, I’ve forged quite the beautiful friendship with cellist/bandleader Rebecca Roudman. 

Marin’s gigging musicians — and producers at local venues where they play — say they are doing a major reset as virtually all of the spring and summer concert seasons this year have been canceled or postponed over the coronavirus pandemic.

“We’re doing Facebook Live concerts every night at 8 p.m.,” said Rebecca Roudman of the blues and bluegrass-inspired band Dirty Cello. Roudman and Jason Eckl, her husband and bandmate, are streaming the concerts from their Novato home.

The creative impulse cannot be denied. With no gigs to play, no museums open and all the theaters dark, our musicians, artists and actors go right on sharing their talents, simply because they must.

With the public ordered to shelter in place during the coronavirus crisis, artists of all kinds have turned to social media to find a stage for their performances.

Even in Northern California, even two decades into the 21st century, women in music often get "unpleasant treatment" says cellist Rebecca Roudman, leader of the band Dirty Cello. "So instead of getting mad about it, I decided to do something positive about it," she said. "That's why we wanted to do a concert that would benefit women,"

Dirty Cello, a local band that generates pure excitement, was started by cellist Rebecca Roudman and guitarist Jason Eckl, eight years ago. Roudman chose the name Dirty Cello because “I wanted to go beyond the limits of what a cello can do.” Also, “so people would be like ‘what the hell is Dirty Cello.’” Their professed focus on blues, bluegrass, and rock understates the fact that they’ll play “anything that moves us emotionally,” she says.  

On the eve of International Women’s Day, which is March 8, rocking blues and bluegrass cellist Rebecca Roudman gathers her favorite North Bay women performers for a joint concert.

From classical Bach to classic rock, Dirty Cello proved they can play those standards, everything in between – and a few originals too! Last Friday’s Kahilu crowd got a two-hour high-energy show to kick off their weekend and they showed their appreciation with a standing ovation.

Sure, Rebecca Roudman plays cello in two symphonies, long considered cellists’ natural habitat. But the cellist, singer and fiddler comes into her own when she’s fronting her eclectic roots band, Dirty Cello. 

 “I love classical music, but I grew up listening to all types of music, and I wanted to play that music on my cello,” she told Strings Magazine. “So I decided to just go for it. I formed Dirty Cello to give me a way to do something different from my other playing.” 

Rebecca Roudman decided it was time for her to step into the spotlight.

The classically trained cellist spent years in the background, playing with orchestras and backing up other musicians.

“I got very bored and very jealous,” Roudman admitted. “When they got up to rip solos, I wanted to get a piece of the action.”

Sure, Rebecca Roudman plays cello in two symphonies, long considered cellists’ natural habitat. But the cellist, singer and fiddler comes into her own when she’s fronting her eclectic roots band, Dirty Cello.

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“I love classical music, but I grew up listening to all types of music, and I wanted to play that music on my cello,” she told Strings Magazine. “So I decided to just go for it. I formed Dirty Cello to give me a way to do something different from my other playing.”

For those seeking a high-priced, grab your finest duds Valentine’s Day night out, forget The Palms in Winters. Not when Dirty Cello is playing.

“The reason we’re having a Valentine’s show is that I hate how expensive everything is on Valentine’s Day, how formal and high pressure it is,” said Rebecca Roudman, the cello behind Dirty Cello, declaring a “reasonably priced, casual and fun” 8 p.m. performance.

OK, the band Dirty Cello — and its lead singer and cello player Rebecca Roudman — are compiling pretty amazing press.

And, wait, they’re coming to a special KVMR 89.5 FM intimate house concert in the radio station’s community room this Sunday, Dec. 15 at 3 p.m. in downtown Nevada City, during Victorian Christmas.

Dirty Cello has all kinds of connotations, some even provocative. But cellist Rebecca Roudman didn’t intend any of that.

“When I play classical cello I think of it as such a clean way to play the instrument,” she says. “I was going for the opposite.”

When Rebecca Roudman started the band Dirty Cello, she didn’t think it would go anywhere. Instead, it’s gone everywhere.

In seven years, Dirty Cello has released seven albums and had multiple tours in England, Italy and China.

Kicking off Thursday will be Dirty Cello, a band which performed on the Minaret Stage last year. 

When you take a cello out of concert halls and chamber settings and let it loose in a bar or nightclub, interesting things tend to happen.

Raised in San Rafael and now living in Novato, Rebecca Roudman makes her living as a cellist in the Oakland Symphony and the Santa Rosa Symphony. She started playing classical music when she was 7 years old, and after graduating as a music major in college, it was all classical music all the time.

First, it’s off to Israel. Then jump on a plane to the United Kingdom. And finish it with a jaunt to Iceland.

And you think you have a long commute to work?

Question: What does an electic bluegrass fusion band and a renowned orchestra have in common? Answer: Rebecca Roudman plays cello for both. Roudman, the versatile bandleader for Dirty Cello, has been performing with the prestigious Santa Rosa Symphony since 2001.

Cellist Rebecca Roudman leads a musical double life. While she is a serious symphonic cellist with experience in a number of Bay Area orchestras, her first love is Dirty Cello, her multi-genre quartet. They return to Blue Note Napa for two shows this Friday evening, Oct. 5.

Music artists who made Redding a regular stop on their tours are joining with a few new faces to rock out — and folk out, and blues out — for those most affected by the Carr Fire. They'll play an eclectic benefit concert when they gather on Aug. 31 at the Cascade Theatre in Redding.

The two co-founders of the local bands Dirty Cello and San Francisco Yiddish Combo were robbed of their musical instruments in San Francisco Tuesday night, but a strong community effort and the ingenious play of a Good Samaritan helped recover the valuable cello and guitar about 15 hours after they went missing.

When lead guitar is replaced by the sound of hot licks on a cello, blues, rock and bluegrass rise to a new dimension. Dirty Cello — a four-piece band from San Francisco — makes its style of string music to inspire audiences to swing, sway and dance.

“Our music has never been described as calming,” cellist Rebecca Roudman says with a laugh. “We love the idea of having people unplug, rock out at our concerts and be happy.”

Crooning into the mic about the injustices of the labels placed on females while rocking out a bluesy riff on the cello is not something you see every day. Dirty Cello strives to be that unique group that turns heads and shatters stereotypes, all centered around that stalwart instrument of any orchestra or symphony—the cello. Lead singer and cellist Rebecca Roudman fills us in on what it takes to break the mold.

Il Museo archeologico nazionale di Napoli è anche "Un museo che suona". Per quattro giorni, dal 31 maggio al 3 giugno, con "Elogio del violoncello", il Mann diretto da Paolo Giulierini si trasformerà in un'immensa scatola sonora grazie alle suggestioni di un originale format musicale firmato da Stefano Valanzuolo.

On YouTube, you can view not one, but three side-by-side-by-side Rebecca Roudmans simultaneously rocking through Purple Haze on three cellos — a 1909 French classic, a gray carbon-fiber model made by Luis and Clark, and an electric cello that resembles a funky hardwood board shaped like a smoothly beveled hourglass. 

At first glance, the core four bandmembers look like unassuming music students from Juilliard or Peabody. All preconceptions are overrun by prodigy Rebecca Roudman and a concept that involves her cello transforming into an electric guitar. 

KAILUA-KONA — San Francisco-based musician Rebecca Roudman has been playing music since she was seven, when she was classically trained on the cello.

What started as a hobby she learned just for fun has turned into a career touring the world with her band, Dirty Cello, and performing something very different from classical music.

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.

Reinventing an instrument that is best known for its somber and melancholy sound, Dirty Cello visits the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur Saturday, Jan. 6. And if the weather cooperates, the band will even play outside under the redwoods — which will create quite a contrast to the frigid conditions most of the country is suffering through. The San Francisco-based ensemble got its start in 2010 after cellist Rebecca Roudman, who had been experimenting with playing rock songs, won a local talent show, “Vallejo’s Got Talent.”

In choosing a band name that conjures all kinds of possibilities, Dirty Cello bandleader Rebecca Roudman feels the decision was simple.

“I like classical, but it’s not my favorite music,” she says. “And I love blues, and I love bluegrass. I have eclectic musical tastes, and over time I began to wonder if it would be possible to do the cello as a lead instrument, like the guitar is in a rock band.”

She then adds this: “When I play classical I think of it as such a clean way to play. I was going for the opposite of that.”

Rebecca Roudman has a complicated relationship with the cello. Classically trained from childhood, she performs with two Bay Area symphonies. But all things being equal, she'd rather just shred.

"I've never been a huge fan of classical music," she says from Berlin, where her band, Dirty Cello, is on an eight-city tour of Europe. (They perform at Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena on Aug. 12). "Polite applause is great, but in-your-face cheering is so much better."

I got married last summer and, when planning for the wedding, there was no question about where I wanted to spend my honeymoon—Italy! Since my new husband [Dirty Cello guitarist Jason Eckl] and I are both in the band, we thought it would be a fun idea to combine our honeymoon with a performance tour.

After 32 hours, I was in China! We had gotten up in the wee hours of the morning (at 4 am) and arrived an hour later at San Francisco International Airport.

Who knew we were actually too early to get checked in? (Wish I had slept 20 more minutes.) The band boarded the plane and after a crazy flight path that veered from San Francisco to Vancouver, Vancouver to Beijing, and Beijing to the Chinese city of Dalian, finally arrived.

A weather-beaten man is listening to Rebecca Roudman, as she plays Jimi Hendrix' "Purple Haze" on the cello. "Awesome!" the aged gentleman murmurs, the moment he recognizes the familiar melody. Clearly a man of the streets, he is seated in the lobby of the Hotel Cadillac in San Francisco's seedy Tenderloin District.

He's a guest at the hotel's weekly Concerts at the Cadillac series, staging free performances of classical, jazz, and world music for residents of the low-income residential hotel.

Rebecca Roudman stands front and center in an automotive garage currently serving as a makeshift video set. The classically trained cellist rests her bow on the instrument’s strings, leans forward, plays a few long mournful notes, then breaks into a rousing, sassy rendition of the Robert Johnson classic tune, “Cross Road Blues.”

It was, perhaps, not a big move. Not like, say, California to Iowa. But even a cross-town change-of-address in Novato can be a bit stressful.

e in Vallejo on Saturday.

“An electric cello. Pretty cool, huh?”
    He nods quickly. “It was almost like it was singing the words.”
    “Exactly. When you can’t sing, the instrument can do it for you.”
    “Can you teach me to play stuff like that?”
    “Yep. We’ll start out easy and then get to the hard stuff as you get better. Rebecca’s even from San Francisco, so maybe we can all go to one of her shows sometime.”
    “That would be cool,” he agrees.
    The look on his face almost makes me want to reach out and hug him, but something about Zander tells me he’s not the hugging type.

There's a good chance you’ve already heard Rebecca Roudman play. She performed on the soundtracks for the Bruce Willis film Looper and the Jeremy Renner film Kill the Messenger. On top of that, her band Dirty Cello has been making its mark on the Bay Area with more than 100 shows a year. Dirty Cello’s most recent release Beach House Sessions was recorded in an idyllic house at Muir Beach, where the band stayed until they finished an album full of classic American blues and bluegrass cover songs.

When Cal State East Bay music graduate Rebecca Roudman ’99, pulled the bow across her cello and played the Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane,”  at a local competition, the audience went wild.

Right then, the term “rock cello” came to her mind and eventually led to the creation of her current musical group, “Dirty Cello”.

“We were brainstorming for a name for our group and thought, ’What is the opposite of playing cleanly on the cello - or playing classically on the cello?’ I came up with Dirty Cello,” Roudman said. “We instantly loved the name. Dirty Cello to us means ‘wild and rockin’.”

Piazza della Chiesa a Vaiano era completamente invasa da persone provenienti da varie parti della provincia ed anche della Toscana, per assistere al concerto dei “Dirty Cello”, formazione statunitense (californiana) ai suoi primi esordi in Italia. Un concerto molto ritmato, composto da elementi blues, musica dance dell’Europa dell’Est, bluegrass e rock classico.  Un concentrato di “folle” energia che ha come protagonista il violoncello, sfruttato al massimo e nel modo più magico e spettacolare.