Erik Friedlander was born in New York City on July 1, 1960 and grew up in Rockland County, north of the city, in a house where music played constantly. His father is the photographer Lee Friedlander, a MacArthur fellow whose street work hangs in the Museum of Modern Art and who shot album covers for Atlantic Records through the 1950s and 1960s; his mother is Maria Friedlander, and he has a younger sister, Anna. His father's habit of making mix tapes, heavy on rhythm and blues and jazz, was the son's first musical education. He began on folk guitar at five and took up the cello at eight through his public elementary school's music program. Every summer the family loaded into a 1966 Chevy pickup with a camper on the back and drove west for two or three months, following his father's photographic assignments and teaching jobs through national parks, small towns, diners and parades. Those trips became the subject of a record he made almost forty years later.

He entered Columbia University in 1978 and graduated in 1982, studying in the music department with the cellist Mark Shulman, playing in the University Orchestra and in student-run groups, and spending summers at the Aspen Music Festival. He was on the basketball team until he dropped it halfway through to declare a music major. His first commercial recording came while he was still an undergraduate: the bassist Harvie S, then billed as Harvie Swartz, put him in the cello chair for Underneath It All, cut at 39th Street Sound on March 1 and 2, 1980 and issued by Gramavision in 1982, with a front cover photograph by his father. What followed was not a straight line. By his own account he was not yet good enough to keep up with the jazz players he had been sitting in with, so he spent years dismantling and rebuilding his technique while paying the rent as a classical freelancer in pick-up orchestras, recording studios and Broadway pits. Only when the rebuild was finished did he return to improvising, at the Knitting Factory and the other downtown rooms of the late 1980s.

The 1990s put him at the centre of the New York downtown scene. He co-led the collective trio Framework with the drummer Kevin Norton and the violinist Laura Seaton, whose sole album appeared on Newport Classic in 1991, and the same year he played on eleven of the fourteen tracks of Fred Hersch's Forward Motion for Chesky. Dave Douglas built a string group around him, Mark Feldman, Mark Dresser and Michael Sarin for Parallel Worlds (Soul Note, 1993) and again for Five (Soul Note, 1996), and he worked steadily with Marty Ehrlich's Dark Woods Ensemble, Ned Rothenberg, Andy Laster and Myra Melford. The association that defined the decade was with John Zorn, who first recorded him on Redbird in 1995 and then made him the cellist of the Masada String Trio, with Mark Feldman on violin and Greg Cohen on bass, and of the six-piece Bar Kokhba. Those two ensembles carried Zorn's Masada songbooks across two decades of Tzadik records, from the double Bar Kokhba (1996) and The Circle Maker (1998) to the Book of Angels volumes Azazel (2005), Lucifer (2008) and Haborym (2010). Zorn also produced Friedlander's own first two leader dates, Chimera (Avant, 1995) and The Watchman (Tzadik, 1996), both by a chamber quartet of cello, clarinet, bass clarinet and bass with Chris Speed, Andrew D'Angelo and Drew Gress.

In 1997 he formed Topaz, a working quartet with Andy Laster on alto saxophone, Stomu Takeishi on electric bass and Satoshi Takeishi on percussion, which recorded four albums across a decade: Topaz (1998) and Skin (2000) for Siam, then Quake (2003) and Prowl (2006) for Cryptogramophone. Grains of Paradise (Tzadik, 2002) set him against a string section with Bryce Dessner on guitar and Trevor Dunn on bass, and Maldoror (Brassland, 2003), recorded in a single day at Teldex Studios in Berlin, was solo cello against readings from Lautréamont. In 2007 he started his own label, Skipstone Records, and gave it two catalogue numbers in three months. The first, Block Ice & Propane, was the road-trip record: solo cello played almost entirely without a bow, in altered tunings, using a finger-picking technique adapted from the guitar. The New York Times called it "the avant-cello album of the summer" and profiled him at length on the day of its Joe's Pub premiere; The New Yorker called it a magnificent solo album. Skipstone's second release, Eiger, followed in October with a large rotating cast including Ralph Alessi and Marty Ehrlich. The same year Tzadik issued Volac, an entire volume of Zorn's Book of Angels arranged by Friedlander for unaccompanied cello, and Anat Cohen put him in the three-cello section of The Anzic Orchestra for Noir. Broken Arm Trio (Skipstone, 2008), a pizzicato cello, bass and drums group with Trevor Dunn and Michael Sarin, took its cue from Oscar Pettiford's cello recordings and from Herbie Nichols.

His wife of twenty-two years, the choreographer and writer Lynn Shapiro, passed away in November 2011 after a decade with breast cancer. Days later he tore a ligament in his thumb in a bicycle accident and could not play for months. He came back with Claws and Wings (Skipstone, 2013), an album-length elegy for her and the most unusual instrumentation he had used to that point, a trio with Sylvie Courvoisier on piano and spinet and Ikue Mori on laptop percussion. Around it he ran two other bands. Bonebridge, with Doug Wamble on slide guitar, Trevor Dunn and Michael Sarin, made Bonebridge (2011) and Nighthawks (2014), the second conceived during the blackout that Hurricane Sandy brought to lower Manhattan. Black Phebe, with Shoko Nagai on piano and accordion and Satoshi Takeishi on percussion, made Nothing on Earth (2014) and Rings (2016). Oscalypso (2015) returned to Oscar Pettiford, this time playing his compositions with Michael Blake on saxophone, and Illuminations (2015) was solo cello again. In 2017 he assembled Throw a Glass, a quartet with Uri Caine on piano, Mark Helias on bass and Ches Smith on drums, which recorded Artemisia (2018) and A Queens' Firefly (2022).

Alongside the leader catalogue he has become a working film and television composer, scoring Cory Finley's Thoroughbreds (2017), Atsuko Hirayanagi's Oh Lucy! (2017), Matthew Weiner's Amazon series The Romanoffs (2018) and Bess Wohl's Baby Ruby (2022), as well as the documentary Nothing on Earth, about the photographer Murray Fredericks on the Greenland icecap. Between 2018 and 2021 he released a self-produced piece of music every month, roughly fifty tracks in four years, later collected as four "Tracks of the Month" albums. More recent records have taken him further from the acoustic quartet: Sentinel (2020) and She Sees (2023), the latter cut at Sony Studios in Mexico City, pair him with the guitarist Ava Mendoza and the drummer Diego Espinosa Cruz, while the double album Dirty Boxing / Floating City (2024) sets the Throw a Glass quartet on one disc against a group with Sara Serpa's voice and Wendy Eisenberg's guitar on the other. Origami (2025) rebuilds the Floating City sessions into new pieces through repitching, spectral filtering and granular looping. Tzadik's The Bagatelles Vol. 2, a two-cello reading of Zorn's Bagatelles book with Michael Nicolas, appeared in 2025. Critics have voted for him in the miscellaneous instrument category of the DownBeat Critics Poll, where he took 41 votes in 2019, one of three cellists on that year's list.

Friedlander's defining move was to stop treating the cello as a bowed instrument that could occasionally be plucked. On Block Ice & Propane, Broken Arm Trio and Oscalypso he plays predominantly pizzicato, using a finger-picking approach carried over from the guitar he started on at five and a set of altered tunings that let open strings ring, and he has said he understands how to shape a line with the plucking hand in a way he does not with the bow. The model for that is explicit and it is a jazz one: Oscar Pettiford, the bassist who recorded on cello in the 1950s, plus the pizzicato of Herbie Nichols's rhythmic writing. The bowed side of his playing runs the other way, toward long sustained lines and a chamber-music sense of voicing, which is why the phrase "chamber jazz" attaches to him so readily, and why reviewers keep pointing out that it undersells what he does. Pitchfork wrote that he could sound "Rostropovich one second and Rottweiler the next," and John Corbett, reviewing Block Ice & Propane in DownBeat, placed it among great American road albums. His compositional habit is programmatic: almost every record is built on an external subject, whether a family road trip, Lautréamont's prose poem, Oscar Pettiford's catalogue, Edward Hopper's paintings, absinthe, or the death of his wife. The result is a body of work that reads as a series of discrete projects rather than a single evolving band sound, and it has made him, by a wide margin, the most recorded improvising cellist of his generation.