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“It’s my hope that this song cycle brings about a sense of connection and shared experience,” says Rondi Charleston about her new project with Fred Hersch.
(Photo: Courtesy Rondi Charleston)Projects produced during the pandemic are hardly in short supply. But few are as pointed, or as poignant, as Suspended In Time–A Song Cycle, a sequence of seven songs with words by Rondi Charleston and music by Fred Hersch. The songs, documented on Resilience Music Alliance, were produced from spring 2020 to spring 2023, the period of the pandemic as declared by the World Health Organization. They report on that perilous period with remarkable specificity.
In their reportage, the songs find expression in emotions that Charleston believes are as universal in the emerging post-pandemic world as they were during the pandemic. And, in expressing those emotions, the songs seek to have a kind of therapeutic effect through their particular synthesis of words and music.
“I see so many folks continuing to experience deep, deep isolation and anxiety as we move into 2025,” Charleston said from her wildfire-spared winter home in Malibu. “As we navigate this growing sense of alienation, it’s my hope that this song cycle brings about a sense of connection and shared experience.”
The project began as poems that Charleston, a former journalist, was writing for herself as a lockdown survival tool. She started sending them to Hersch in the hope, if not the expectation, that he would agree to set them to music. To her delight, Hersch, an old friend, did so.
Holed up in his second home amid the Pennsylvania woods, with a return to live gigging in question, Hersch, too, was seeking lifelines. From his first reading of her words, he realized that he could take on the commission with ease.
“I heard music pretty much immediately,” he said, noting that most of the songs dwelled in the world of diatonic harmony and were completed in a day or two.
The first four songs were written before the COVID vaccine became available, and their tone reflects it. The opener, “Suspended In Time,” mines poet and essayist T.S. Eliot’s disorienting explorations of liminality. Charleston, drawing on her jazz side — she switched to performing jazz after a stint as a Juilliard-trained opera singer — expands on Eliot’s ideas and makes them her own.
In her lyrics, she details the experience of “living somewhere between never and always” — words of disorientation, to be sure, made only more so set against the disarming charm of Hersch’s guileless waltz. Rendered in singer Kate McGarry’s mellifluous lilt atop the lush harmonies of the Crosby String Quartet, the piece becomes a deft evocation of the complex feelings engendered by the lockdown.
The tone turns decidedly melancholy with “Sea Of Eyes.” Inspired by Charleston’s observations of people peering over masks with “eyes that question, eyes that plead,” her words are an invitation to the melodramatic. But Hersch’s sensibility hardly allows it; his spare setting commands a sort of self-possession. And singer Gabrielle Stravelli — who, like Charleston, is a trained actor as well as vocalist — obliges.
“You want to find an interpretation that honors that sadness, that reflects the weirdness we experienced in the pandemic and the disconnection and the walls we had to put up in various ways,” she said. “You walk the tightrope of not glazing over it and not going too far so that it becomes overdramatic and not believable.”
The third and fourth songs both deviate somewhat from the prevailing patterns. Unlike the other songs in the cycle, “Lullaby (For Elsa),” written for Charleston’s ailing mother residing in a care facility, is not directly related to the pandemic. Nonetheless, the feelings of isolation McGarry captures in her wistful interpretation of Hersch’s simple waltz mirror what many people felt during the lockdown.
“Fever Dreams,” for its part, is the only track on which Charleston’s voice appears, albeit in spoken word. Supported by Hersch’s graceful piano, Charleston, suffering from long COVID and unable to muster the airflow necessary to sing up to her standard — thus the need to recruit McGarry and Stravelli — fantasizes about “the sheer pleasure of a full imbibe/greedy lungs opening wide.” Breathily and brilliantly delivered, her words unfold with a quality of free association that hints at feelings of liberation despite being trapped at home with little more than your imagination to engage you.
The final three post-vaccine songs flow just as freely, if in more precisely structured form. “Awakenings (An Ode To Science)” dances to the samba-like cadences of tunes like Antonio Carlos Jobim’s joyous “Waters Of March.” While Hersch likened his writing for this song cycle more to that of musical theater than jazz, he takes the opportunity here to conjure a buoyant bit of improvisatory magic that fits neatly between McGarry’s ebullient choruses.
“It’s a feeling of wonder,” McGarry said, describing the hopeful time in which the tune was written and, perhaps, her state of mind in singing it. “You don’t know what’s going to happen, but you’re ready for something new. That was an easy one to connect with.”
The exuberance of “Awakenings” gives way to the more complicated reality of “Patience.” An exercise in purposeful restraint, the song, written as the first COVID variant hit, returns to the realm of the liminal, its theme encapsulated in what Charleston’s lyrics term “the paradox of patience — it entices and it stalls/and still you’re trapped inside these walls.”
The circumstances of the song’s execution imbue that paradox with a fortuitous irony. Stravelli, who was assigned the piece, happens, by her own account, to be “the least patient person in the world.” The tension between her tendency toward impatience and the painfully slow tempo at which the song must flow lends the performance a sense of urgency that might otherwise not be there.
Stravelli returns for the closing tune, “Here We Are,” which itself returns to the music of the opening tune, a step lower and maybe a bit wiser. Charleston explained that rather than McGarry, who sang the opener, Stravelli drew the closing assignment because the “darker” hue of her voice more readily conveyed the sober truth of the post-pandemic world.
We are, she writes, “still living somewhere between never and always.” DB
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