Sarah Elizabeth Charles and Jarrett Cherner, who are married, collaborated on a new album titled
Tone. (Photo: Fanny Delsol)
As an aspiring jazz singer, the teenage Sarah Elizabeth Charles wanted to be Sarah Vaughan. But after writing a lot of tunes that she imagined Vaughan might have sung, the Massachusetts native sensed that the music was not a fully authentic expression of her artistic self. She needed to reassess her goals. And she did so when she moved to New York and enrolled at The New School. “I was beginning to see that there was a part of my voice that I wasn’t allowing to come through,” she said in a December conversation via Zoom. “I remember during my freshman year going out to hear so much music in New York, and all of it sounded so different and all of it was jazz. I thought, ‘Maybe if I just let myself be for a little while, my voice has validity here. It just has to find its own space.’”