Cheryl B. Engelhardt: The Passenger
CBE Music
A fascinating backstory lends Cheryl B. Engelhardt's The Passenger additional gravitas. Rather than simply imagining the adventures of a traveler, the project originated out of personal experience and the death of someone close to her. Scheduled to attend the 2022 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, Engelhardt decided to take the train from New York rather than fly. However, when her friend and collaborator Kevin Archambault passed away from cancer on the day the event was postponed, she decided not to cancel her cross-country trip and leave anyway, two weeks later as scheduled. The nine days on the train were spent composing and producing the album's productions, which were mixed and mastered following the trip. Other artists, including flutist Sherry Finzer and the Dallas String Quartet, contribute to six of the nine tracks, the collaborations effected when Engelhardt sent them files from the train. As a word, passenger can connote passivity, but her project was anything but. Produced in its entirety in three months, The Passenger is the sound of a creative artist responding to tragic circumstances in the most assertive manner possible.
The wealth of experience Engelhardt's acquired helped facilitate production for the project. During seventeen years (and counting) in the music business, she's become a highly regarded New Age artist but has also created material for theatre and garnered attention for a collaboration with Dr. Martin Luther King's goddaughter, Donzaleigh Abernathy, for the song “The Listening.” The skills she's developed are used to terrific effect on The Passenger, at thirty-two minutes more mini-album than full-length yet engrossing and rewarding nonetheless; in fact, most tracks could have been extended a minute or two longer and the album would have been no worse for wear.
In adding violin and vocals to “The Beautiful Bridge,” Lili Haydn takes Engelhardt's poignant New Age meditation to an even more transporting place. Crystalline ambient textures provide a soothing ground for the vocal-like supplications of the violin, and one comes away from the music with a peaceful acceptance of death's inevitability. Complementing it is the melancholy reverie “The Light That's Left” for the way it conveys gratitude for the gifts the deceased gave others and the memories that remain long after the person's gone. Classical and New Age merge in “The Chariot” when the Dallas String Quartet adds luscious textures to the stately electronic soundscape Engelhardt fashioned for the material. Acclaimed flutist Finzer adds her artistry to the gentle serenade “The Two Feathers,” whose title references the many bird species Engelhardt saw from the train as she made her way West; pianist Danaë Vlasse does something similar in elevating the synthesizer foundation of “The Message” with graceful keyboard ruminations.
Titles such as “The Beautiful Bridge” and “The Angels' Lullaby” allude to death, yet the overall tone of the music is less glum than uplifting. That's certainly conveyed by the blissful serenity of the becalmed closer “The Ambient Love,” and another track, “The Zephyr Remembers,” even verges on uptempo when it's animated by a locomotive pulse, the character of the rhythm pattern hardly an accident. While Engelhardt doesn't shy away from acknowledging Archambault's passing, The Passenger registers as a warm tribute and heartfelt appreciation for her friend, and that so much of it was created from a train “roomette” makes the result all the more impressive.June 2022