Rondi Charleston | "Suspended In Time"

Celebrated Vocalist/Lyricist Rondi Charleston and Master Pianist/Composer Fred Hersch Collaborate on

Suspended in Time—A Song Cycle, a Poignant and Evocative Meditation on the Loss of Time Itself

Featuring Vocalists Kate McGarry and Gabrielle Stravelli,

The Crosby String Quartet, Clarinetist Bruce Williamson, Bassist Matt Aronoff, Drummer Kush Abadie and Percussionist Rogerio Boccato

Available February 7, 2025 via Resilience Music Alliance

Performing at Joe’s Pub, NYC, on March 30, 2025

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.

The seven-song collaboration between the two artists is scheduled to be released February 7, as her seventh album. It will be issued on her mission-driven GRAMMY-winning record label Resilience Music Alliance (RMA), an independent imprint founded in 2017 by Charleston and her husband Steve Ruchefsky, to empower artists who celebrate the human condition of resilience.

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.”

Charleston has experienced several chapters in her life. She started as an actress and opera singer, graduating from Juilliard, then through an unexpected turn of events, switched direction into the world of journalism, working at ABC News with Diane Sawyer’s investigative team, and winning Emmy and Peabody Awards along the way. She ultimately came full circle back to music and “to my first love, which has always been jazz and creating meaningful new work.”

The evocative opening title tune sung majestically by McGarry features the Crosby Street String Quartet and was arranged by Hersch. Observing some days and seasons that “flew by in a blur” where stretched out forever with huge, gaping black holes” Charleston continues with Sea of Eyes” remembering how we were all “keeping our distance ….and moving in single file.” It features the string quartet, a haunting clarinet solo by Bruce Williamson and the beauty of Stravelli’s passionate voice.

Charleston’s reflective and nostalgic “Lullaby” was written when her beloved 90-year-old mother, Elsa, was in isolation with Covid at her independent living facility in Chicago. “I really thought we were going to lose her, and I wasn’t allowed to visit – to comfort her. Time seemed to stop moving. It is the most personal and vulnerable of songs.”

The spoken word “Fever Dreams” reveals Charleston’s only vocal appearance. It’s a passionate fantasy written in the long stretch from summer to winter, as she was longing for human contact, the joys and pleasures of life, and reliving the memories of festive times. “When I sent the lyrics to Fred, he said ‘it’s a spoken-word poem,’” Charleston says. “And because of my long Long Covid, it was perfect for me to just speak it. It was a fever dream I had about wanting to experience life at its fullest again, to be in contact with people.”

The rousing “Awakenings” was created during the spring when the vaccine was discovered and finally available. She refers to “the dawn of the truth” and “wonder of life” where “the world wants to sing.” Charleston says this tune “expresses the explosive euphoria – the giddy elation that I think we all

collectively felt at that time.”

States McGarry: “As I’ve gotten to know Rondi over the years, I see her as a bit of a chameleon as well as a renaissance woman. I’ve stopped being surprised when another of her talents comes to the fore, and just relish being in her world, and seeing how her compassion and care always manage to make life better for others. Having long ago eschewed the stylistic boundaries of the ‘jazz singer’ moniker, I thought of this music as ‘art songs’ and sought to interpret Rondi’s narratives through Fred’s rich melodic settings as directly as I could.”

As the virus morphed, Charleston took the time to write about what it was like being forced back into prison, so to speak, in summer of 2022. She writes about the whole notion of patience as “creeping through time.” Stravelli considers “Patience” her favorite tune. “I’m a deeply impatient person,

so it felt delightfully ironic that I was given this song to interpret,” she says. “I love the languid feeling of it and enjoyed trying to mine all the colors of this very specific vibe.”

The album closes with “Here We Are,” which includes the lines of “permission to live again,” “the moment we dreamed for” and “the chance to create a new story.” Stravelli says the composition has “such a gorgeous melody. It’s the most hopeful of the songs I recorded, which made it a pleasure to sing.”

Charleston says she’s learned that it is “possible to move forward and create positive new neuropathways in our brains so that we can live with a sense of joy. Fred is a true genius, and we went out to the edge together. I am so grateful to have that experience with someone who knows what it’s like to live on the edge of time.”

In closing, Charleston states: “I feel that the artist’s job is not only to capture what’s going on in the world around her, but to reflect on what’s going on; to try to make sense out of chaos. Hopefully, I can also entertain, inspire, and leave audiences with a feeling of hope for the future. My challenge is to write music and lyrics that do all three.”

Rondi Charleston • Suspend in Time — A Song Cycle

Resilience Music Alliance • Release Date: February 7, 2025

For more information on Rondi Charleston, please visit:

www.rondicharleston.com | Instagram | Facebook

For media inquiries, please contact:

DL Media · ‭(917) 929-4910‬‬

Roberta Lawrence · roberta@dlmediamusic.com

Don Lucoff · don@dlmediamusic.com

For the Preferred Artist

Information and press materials (including album covers, promotional photos

and bios) on all DL Media artists can be found at our website: dlmediamusic.com

###