Vocal-Piano Duo Sarah Elizabeth Charles And Jarrett Cherner Release TONE

Genre bending vocalist Sarah Elizabeth Charles and pianist Jarrett Cherner have released their much-anticipated recorded debut, Tone as a duo. Tone displays the pairs' impressive songwriting chops as they shine on eight original tunes featuring poignant lyrics and beautiful melodies. Four years in the making, the album was completed just before the pandemic lockdown and finalized at their Brooklyn home, lending an exquisite intimacy to this charming release.

Cherner's expansive piano harmonies compliment Charles' intricate multi-tracked vocal parts and subtly placed echoes and effects. These elements grow to fill the sonic space, as the songs touch on transcendent themes of selfless love and living with purpose and intention. The process brought Charles and Cherner to new creative places within themselves. As stated in the provided notes, Cherner says: "we leaned on our respective strengths in terms of harmony, melody, and lyric writing," says Cherner, "but we also experimented with reversing roles, where I would sing and Sarah would play piano, just to see what that would generate." The song "Speak," Charles notes, came about as a result of such a role reversal. "At first we explored with no agenda," she adds, "making sounds and seeing what came out instinctively."

Two of the compositions on Tone take inspiration from poetry. "Speak" is almost entirely wordless, but the song was first inspired by poet Mary Oliver's idea of prayer taking the most simple, humble form: "Oliver grounds the meaning of praying in allowing another voice to speak," Charles says, "and specifies that this act can happen anywhere and in any way." Similarly, Cherner read Robert Frost's poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" and wove it into what became "Hanging On To Time," its yearning minor-key lyricism evocative of "wishing you could slow down time to savor a moment or even a season."

Charles' shows off her vocal looping prowess on "Gloria," dedicated to the feminine spirit that exists in all of us, and "Shine On," a contemporary blues with a bridge and a soli that Cherner explains as a song of "personal empowerment and growth." "We're both coming from the jazz tradition, the Black American Music tradition," Charles says, "so improvising has brought so much to our creative process. During this time in quarantine, we've used the studio as a space where I can improvise vocal parts on the spot, layer and explore, while also taking time to write more composed background vocals. It's an approach that we've taken to both writing and recording that feels rooted in the tradition we're coming from."

If Tone has a central message, it is perhaps the repeated phrase "love the world" that occurs at the end of the contemplative opening track, "Conscious Mind." Charles and Cherner did not set out originally with a theme in mind, but the subject of love, in the broadest senses of the word, seemed to emerge. "Much like the tradition of metta meditation in Buddhism, you start by practicing being kind to and loving yourself," Cherner says, "but as you develop that heart muscle, you expand outward: you cultivate loving-kindness for your friends and family, for your acquaintances, for difficult people in your life, and eventually for all beings." In its way, the music of Tone reflects this: it looks inward and outward all at once, capturing Charles and Cherner's individual artistic voices even as it brings about something new and whole on its own terms.

Both Charles and Cherner are active in New York City. Charles has appeared on a number of brilliant recordings this year, including Jesse Fischer's recent Resilience and Ajoyo's world-music infused War Chant. Cherner can often be found performing with Charles and his last album as a leader, Expanding Heart, received much critical acclaim at the time of release. Lately the duo has been featured at the Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn. They'll be back at the venue on December 6th at 8pm.

Tone is out on Cherner's label BaldHill Records.