SYNOPSIS

The year is 1955: Charlie “Bird” Parker is dead. The ravages of his lifelong addiction have reached their inevitable terminus, leaving his broken body in the hotel suite of friend and patron Nica, a wealthy baroness.

Nica leaves the body unidentified at the morgue, wishing to break the news to Charlie’s longtime girlfriend Chan first. Nica also hopes to mitigate the scandal of a Black man being found dead in her suite in a segregated hotel. Meanwhile, Charlie’s spirit alights in Birdland [a club that the real-life Charlie Parker loaned his name to, but which he never owned or profited from]. He begs Nica for more time with his memories and his music before his body is claimed at the morgue. His soul cannot rest until he attempts to achieve his musical masterwork - a revolution of form like his idol, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.

The opera follows a diffuse and dreamlike, nonlinear form as Bird reminisces imagined conversations from past and present with his closest confidants. The past and present merge as we revisit Charlie as a youth in Kansas City, relentlessly devoted to practicing saxophone by rote, already demonstrating a fascination with “weird” and challenging sounds like the tritone, historically known as the “Devil’s Interval.” This interlude foreshadows both his radical, tonally ambitious 12-tone innovations as a progenitor of bebop jazz composition, as well as the figurative devil of addiction on his shoulder, which he will ultimately be unable to outrun.

In the past, his mother Addie and his first wife Rebecca duet on the challenges of being –and loving– a Black man in America. [Historical note: Charlie and Rebecca were married when they were both teenagers in 1936 – the same year that Parker suffered a car wreck on tour that would contribute to his lifelong addiction to painkillers and heroin. He left his first wife and son Leon behind when he moved to New York City to pursue his career.]

Charlie’s third wife Doris then attempts to help his spirit find peace. They discuss Bird’s renunciation of religion - he would remain an avowed atheist. [Historical note: Parker’s second wife, Geraldine, is not a character in this opera. Less is known about Geraldine’s life and their short-lived marriage. By her own account, “When I met him, all he had was a horn and a habit. He gave me his habit.”]

Musical collaborator and best friend Dizzy Gillespie appears and jovially commiserates with Bird about their shared love for music, and for one another. They celebrate the birth of bebop, and lament the struggles of being a musician.

We are next introduced to Chan, Bird’s partner at the time of his death. [Historical note: Charlie never married Chan, but they were, by modern definition, common law spouses. Chan was the mother of his two young children, Pree and Baird.] Dizzy and Charlie reminisce about the night Chan and Bird first met in the club. She playfully recounts her instant feelings of love and admiration. Part I closes with Chan and Charlie’s declarations of love.

Part II opens with Dizzy and Bird’s ill-fated decision to tour in California in 1945. His mother Addie appears as a harbinger, celebrating the elation of hearing her son’s music on the radio, but warning him to keep his darker predilections at bay.

Once in California, Charlie learns from Chan that their young daughter Pree has died. The news sends him spiraling, invoking a 5150, the police code for involuntary psychological commitment. Bird is institutionalized in Camarillo, California for six months.

After his spirit is freed from this troubling memory, Charlie sings an impassioned aria addressing his horn, in the dramatic catharsis of the opera. He sublimates his words of yearning and apology to his instrument. Nevertheless, it is a moment of triumph as he recognizes the saxophone itself represents his life’s great work, his truest love.

As Charlie ultimately achieves some measure of peace, the women in his life are left, in the living world, to clash about his final resting place, an echo of the real-life legal battle that would ensue in settling his estate. Chan appeals to the grieving Addie to honor Bird’s wishes that his body be interred in New York City, rather than in the hometown he strived so hard to escape. His wives Rebecca and Doris join the argument and add their own accounts, in a sweeping ensemble.

Dizzy and Nica both reappear to eulogize the fallen Bird, before we are finally left alone, once again, with Charlie. He recites lines from Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s famous poem, “Sympathy:” “I know why the caged bird sings…”

-Amitra Vijayaraghavan and Andrew Stephens