09a Layale Chaker VigilVigil
Ethel & Layale Chaker
In A Circle Records ICR030 (ethelcentral.bandcamp.com/album/vigil-icr030)

Radio Afloat
Layale Chaker & Sarafand
In A Circle Records ICR031 (layalechaker.bandcamp.com/album/radio-afloat-icr031)

For violinist Layale Chaker, the trigger for her composition Vigil, performed with the ensemble ETHEL, was the revolution in Lebanon. The work, however, takes its inspiration from the poem What They Did Yesterday Afternoon by the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire. As the liner notes tell us, the poem “sketches, with startling economy, a world torn by a cascading series of problems…” 

Chaker’s musical lines are closely aligned with the rhythm of the “world torn” and their dark tones and textures reflect the density of this “cascading.” Like the writer, she too visualises the fabric of humanity like expensive raw silk. This is reflected in the harmonic overtones that enrich the stark narratives of each of the movements of Vigil, building up to an almost frenzied crescendo in the fifth, and final episode of the tone poem. 

The members of ETHEL also contribute a piece each to this recording that describes a world in the thrall of a dark, existential angst. Chaker and the members of ETHEL employ an inspired understanding of Phrygian modes that inform Andalusi literature using a strophic form called qasida and maqama which Chaker brilliantly transforms into phrases made of ephemeral, almost ghostly glissandi that turns her into a kind of shamanic alchemist, enabling her to send audiences into emotional states that border on both the mystical and the magical. This (inspired use of maqama in her art) spells the true genius of Chaker’s musicianship. It is also what makes this recordingirresistibly hypnotic. 

09b Layale Chaker SarafandIf you listen to Chaker’s next recording Radio Afloat, fairly soon after you’ve listened to Vigil and you sense more pain in the works therein, you would be absolutely right. But consider this. The city of Beirut, (capital of her birth-country Lebanon), was once called the “Paris of the Middle East.” It was the proverbial city of light, so alive with joie de vivre that the sun never seemed to set on its citizenry. But internecine wars precipitated by religious strife, the greed of those who held positions of power and the residual effects of colonialism spelled the city’s (and country’s) doom.

The feeling of loss, of the sharp pain of having to leave behind what you love and emigrate elsewhere, will never leave a person who had experienced the kind of paradise that Beirut once was. This sense of loss is what burns with a slow blue flame throughout Radio Afloat

The music is played here by Chaker and the ensemble Sarafand, which comprises a cello, contrabass, piano, microtonal keyboard and a drum set that includes Lebanese frame drums. It also features Chaker’s vocals, characterised by ululating, high and lonesome wailing. Radio Afloat is an eight-movement suite which, as Chaker tells us, is woven into, and echoes, The Trace of Blue Passion, a poem by the Lebanese writer Ounsi el-Hage. 

The Trace of Blue Passion is a glorious lament in which the poet informs us: “After we witnessed the extent of bird’s wisdom / I remind you that it is in the nature of creatures / to harm themselves.” Like the poet, Chaker and the performers of Sarafand match the poem’s lyricism with profound musical beauty and classical pathos.

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