From their beginnings in 1998, the members of ETHEL have prized collaboration. In recent years, the quartet has struck up a particularly fruitful collaboration with the Lebanese-born, Brooklyn-based violinist and composer Layale Chaker. This recording offers a chance to document some of that collective work, with each member of ETHEL contributing a piece and Chaker herself contributing two tracks, one of which is the remarkable work that gives this album its name.

Vigil begins with violist Ralph Farris’s “Novembers” in an appropriately autumnal mood, with a gently rocking rhythm and occasional rushes of sound, like the wind sweeping the leaves off the trees. It builds, though, into something more insistent, and perhaps stormier, before subsiding into a spare, wintry conclusion. “The Demon Within”, by cellist Dorothy Lawson, casts an eerie spell that somehow manages to suggest both the richly-textured darkness of Mussorgsky’s Night On Bald Mountain and the haunted landscape of George Crumb’s Black Angels. Violinist Kip Jones contributes “Teen Mania,” a jaunty piece filled with riffs that sound like folk fiddling, although it’s not always clear which “folk” tradition that might be. Celtic? Nordic? Appalachian? There are no such questions about “Sketka,” by ETHEL’s other violinist, Corin Lee. This piece is a whirl of Balkan energy, with the strings pausing at one point to make way for a brief frame drum solo. As for the two collaborations with Layale Chaker, the shorter of the pair is her arrangement of an Andalusian muwashah – the poem-songs of the Iberian peninsula during the period between the 9th and 13th centuries. In her version of “Salla Fina Llahdu,” variations on the song’s lovely, serpentine melody are supported both by some rhythmic playing from the lower strings and a frame drum.

The centerpiece of the album, both figuratively and literally, is the title track. Vigil is a work in four parts plus an epilogue that Layale Chaker and ETHEL began working on during lockdown. It is inspired by the poem “What They Did Yesterday Afternoon” by the Somali-British writer Warsan Shire. Short, quiet, plain-spoken, and utterly devastating, Shire’s work sketches, with startling economy, a world torn by a cascading series of problems: climate crisis, forced emigration, fear of The Other. The opening line of the poem answers the question in the title: “they set my aunts house on fire.” Her prayers, she writes, go like this: “i come from two countries/one is thirsty/the other is on fire/both need water.”

Chaker’s piece begins with a movement called “Of Thirst,” restless at first, and eventually settling on a winding melody accompanied by a rhythmic ostinato. “Vigil,” the second movement, is a nocturne, but a disturbed one, full of fleeting shadows and glissandi that evoke the sounds of a distant siren. “Of Fire” then bursts into activity, stutters several times, and subsides briefly, before returning to its volatile beginning. “Later that night, I held an atlas in my lap” (a direct quote from the poem) offers a keening lament, initially over a soft drone, and then a repeated pizzicato figure. Modal passages suggest the Near East, and Chaker’s own experience of war in Lebanon, but there are also passages for the full ensemble which have a more universal, alarmed sound – the sound of Warsan Shire’s protagonist running her finger over the atlas and asking where it hurts, only to be told “everywhere / everywhere / everywhere.”

But Chaker was not content to simply follow the path of the poem, and so Vigil now concludes with “Epilogue.” Here, Near Eastern melody and countermelody intertwine over an almost percussive rhythm; then short episodes of mourning are overtaken by moments of forceful energy – the musical equivalent of Chaker’s own written inscription on the score, urging us to turn anger and incomprehension into action and resilience.

ETHEL and Layale Chaker performed some of Vigil remotely during the pandemic, on an episode of WNYC’s New Sounds. During that session, violist Ralph Farris summed up the feeling of working with Chaker on this piece: “She is so mighty in her resolve, and in the voice that she puts forward; and it’s just such an honor to work with her.”

John Schaefer, WNYC/New Sounds

January 2024