Cellist Matt Haimovitz, above, performs with pianist Geoff Burleson Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Music Mansion, Congdon and Meeting Streets, on the East Side of Providence.

Cellist Matt Haimovitz has been on something of a benefit tour these past two weeks, one that has taken him from Chicago to Cleveland, where he appeared with a group of hip young players who perform classical music for free to blue-collar audiences.

This weekend he will be at the Music Mansion, on Providence’s East Side, for a recital to benefit Community MusicWorks, the group that’s based in the West End of Providence, where it gives free music lessons to kids from the inner city.

“These are the kind of organizations that are going to turn around all the talk about music education and outreach,” Haimovitz said on the phone from Chicago. “Community MusicWorks is really doing it, they are not just talking about it.”

Haimovitz, who has been called the “coolest” cellist of our time, has made a name for himself by touring the country in his car playing Bach at rock clubs and coffee houses. He has made recordings of Led Zeppelin and his own arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s sizzling rendition of the national anthem.

This year he has done more a mix of clubs and traditional venues, though. He has been playing a lot of concertos, he said, including a four-movement score for cello and a 20-piece big band that was written for him by Massachusetts composer David Sanford.

The first movement, he said, is a little Schoenbergian, with a rhythm section, the second inspired by the band Wilco, and the third sort of a mix of bee-bop and klezmer. In the finale, John Coltrane meets Prokofiev.

Haimovitz recorded the piece live at The Knitting Factory, in New York City, and has been touring it this year.

“It’s not easy touring with a 20-piece big band, but I think it’s catching on,” Haimovitz said of the Sanford score.

“These guys can not only read any type of music, they are great improvisers, which keeps things lively every night.”

But Haimovitz will be playing more standard fare here Sunday — sort of. The Providence program is, in part, a nod to composer Elliott Carter, who turns 100 this December — and is still composing. Haimovitz will be playing his 1946 sonata, which he said is the 20th-century sonata for cello and piano, one of the greatest works for the instrument.

Haimovitz admitted that he’s not a big fan of the cello-piano combo, two instruments that he said don’t seem to fit together. He said he’s more comfortable with the string trio format.

But Carter makes the combination work.

“Beethoven miraculously created a level of equality between these two instruments,” said Haimovitz, “But Carter, in my opinion, goes a step further, creating a sense of equality by celebrating their uniqueness. Instead of going with the Beethoven model of who do you give the material to and what role do you play, he gives a certain personality, a certain sense of timing to each instrument. And in that way these two very disparate instruments co-exist.”

Haimovitz, who was born in Israel in 1970, was 10 years old when Itzhak Perlman discovered him in a master class and recommended he take lessons with the legendary Leonard Rose at Juilliard. Rose once called Haimovitz “probably the greatest talent I’ve ever taught.”

Haimovitz was a hot property in his teens and recorded for Deutsche Grammophon. But he took time off to go to Harvard, and for a while he lived in Europe with his composer wife, Luna Pearl Woolf.

These days, Haimovitz and his wife are based in Montreal, where he teaches at McGill University. He also has his own record label, Oxingale, for which he records two or three CDs a year. His latest effort, After Reading Shakespeare, contains a number of short contemporary solo pieces.

Besides the Carter sonata, Sunday’s program includes music by Beethoven, the romantic Samuel Barber sonata, David Sanford’s 12-minute 22 Part 1, and a new work commissioned from Augusta Read Thomas called Cantos for Slava, which, of course, refers to the late great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

Haimovitz and pianist Geoff Burleson perform Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Music Mansion, Congdon and Meeting Streets, on the East Side of Providence. Tickets are $25. Call (401) 861-5650 for reservations, because the concert is expected to sell out.

cgray@projo.com