By Robert Hicks

Downtown darlings Ethel must be having fun playing in a string quartet. How else to explain all those car noises, footsteps, bird chirps, parrot talk, cowboy yelps, rooster crows, cat meows and strains of Marvin Gaye, Texas swing, Brazilian folk and Appalachia on the group’s new CD, Light? That’s light as in light, fun-loving music.

Comprised of Juilliard alumni—violinists Mary Rowell and Cornelius Dufallo, violist Ralph Farris and cellist Dorothy Lawson—Ethel showed its dark, serious side on its eponymous debut CD in 2003. In between its frosh and sophomore recordings, the string quartet collaborated with musicians as diverse as Joe Jackson, Todd Rundgren, Mark Stewart and New York singer/songwriter Dana Kurtz. The new disc features the members’ own original compositions, Rowell’s arrangement of jazz pianist Lennie Tristano’s “Requiem” and Farris’ arrangement of Timo Alakotila’s “Pelimanni’s Revenge,” as well as commissioned pieces from young, Brazilian composer Marcelo Zarvos, jazz clarinetist Don Byron, film composer Mary Ellen Childs and San Francisco audio artist Pamela Z.

“We like to groove. We basically like tonal music. Whatever the music is, we want it to have a voice, so that it’s not just an intellectual concept,” says Rowell. “We want to be accessible, but at the same time, we can’t just go out and play covers of rock tunes like other groups do.”

Ethel recently appeared at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, Calif., where the quartet heard Einstein, a female African gray parrot who lives at the Knoxville Zoo in Tennessee. The bird’s talkative antics inspired Rowell’s humorous composition, “Also Sprach Einstein.”

“The opening Einsteinisms just created the mood for a party tune,” says Rowell.

Prior to their upcoming CD release show at Joe’s Pub, Ethel headed out West for the Grand Canyon Music Festival, the first leg of their “Truck Stop” project that found the quartet first working with young Native American composers for one week in late August. New York documentary film director, Molly McBride, captured the quartet’s activities there. Next spring, Ethel will work with shape-note singers in Lexington, Kentucky.

“We really want to be able to integrate into communities and learn about what’s important to them and to learn about our country a little bit through that kind of interchange,” says Rowell. Future plans for the Truck Stop project include working with a Texan conjunto artist and a Hawaiian musician for an upcoming concert in New York. This December, the group will present its House of Ethel show at the World Financial Center, sponsored by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). “There’s always an element of surprise in an Ethel show,” she says, “You never know what’s going to happen.”

September 12. Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. Astor Place & E. 4th St.), 212-254-1263; 7:30, $15.

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