Fred Hersch / Rondi Charleston - Suspended in Time: A Song Cycle

Little did highly celebrated jazz vocalist Rondi Charleston realize that her album Resilience, released in 2017, would foretell a profound new chapter of a life-changing narrative. Resilience was a meaningful collection of melody-rich original songs where Charleston wrote about elemental struggles, capturing the modern angst of the culture and recovering from the throes of socio/political dysfunction.

Three years later, in 2020, Charleston—like so many creative artists, found herself looking inward, trying to “stay sane” during the pandemic by writing in her journal as a mode of survival. Those journal entries evolved into sketches of poems, and then eventually into songs, rendering the poignant and beautiful Suspended in Time—A Song Cycle, a unique and rich collaboration with her close friend master jazz pianist/composer Fred Hersch, who performs on the album and serves as its producer.

At heart, while the pandemic provided the backdrop for the music, the piece is really about the loss of time itself. “We experienced time under a giant magnifying glass,” says Charleston, “the nature of time is the jumping off point into the poetry and music – its elasticity, its porous quality, the days that dissolved into weeks, months and years. It exposed us to our most vulnerable selves, and caused us to examine — how do we value time? How do we choose to spend the time we have left? Who do we choose to spend it with?”

The cycle starts with “Suspended in Time” set in mid-winter spring of 2020 when Charleston says, “the ground dropped out from under our feet, and we felt suspended in thin air.” It continues through each season, ending in spring of 2023 with “Here We Are,” a kind of reckoning where we feel renewed hope and optimism in the face of adversity. “I’m living with a heightened sense of intention now,” Charleston adds. “I’ve been profoundly changed by going through this experience with Fred. He knows firsthand what it’s like to live on borrowed time. He doesn’t waste a moment, and he is a huge inspiration.”

The magical reality: from journal form to poetry to songs. Charleston has a long professional and personal history with Hersch beginning with working together on a song for No Place on Earth, an award-winning documentary film released in 2015 by Magnolia Pictures about Ukrainian families who survived together in underground caves for three years during the Nazi invasion.

In the album notes, Hersch wrote: “When Rondi started sending me her lyrics, it gave me a sense of purpose. It was a way to make use of a terrible time to do something inspiring and, I hoped, a way to channel what I was feeling into some material that would reflect what we were all going through. I am grateful that she entrusted me with her words, and now we are happy to share them with the world.”

What’s remarkable about the album is that Rondi, who has diminished lung capacity from a two-year battle with Long Covid, does not sing the songs she wrote. She leaves that to her good friend (and RMA label mate) Kate McGarry and Gabrielle Stravelli, who had worked with Hersch on his Rooms of Light project. “I’m grateful to have the amazing, brilliant and creative geniuses Kate and Gabrielle bring my words to life,” Charleston says. “After performing my own originals for years, it’s thrilling to hear great artists, who are superb storytellers, tackling these songs, and making them their own.”