Daniel Schnyder, Charlie Parker's Yardbird (2015)

I really want to like jazz more.  I feel I should.  It seems cool.  I mean, I don't dislike it, but there's definitely an extent to which I don't get it.  But maybe I could!  I'm certainly not a classical expert, but these days I can at least make basic distinctions between baroque, classical, romantic, and modern music.  Well, maybe in the future I'll become a jazz aficionado.  It could happen!

Well, at any rate, I saw this, which from what I can tell seems to be one of your more popular contemporary operas.  It's been performed a bunch of times all over the place.  That title is confusing to me, however: I know Parker's nickname was Yardbird, but that apostrophe stops me dead in my tracks.  Is it "Charlie Parker is in possession of Yardbird," or is it "Charlie Parker is Yardbird?"  Neither of these seems right.

Regardless!  So we start just following Parker's untimely death in 1955.  But his ghost is still there, and wants to complete a final piece of music.  From there we go into a nonlinear series of events, some happening in the present as characters interact with his ghost, and some in the past.  The other characters are the woman who found his body, his mother, his ex-wives, and his bandmate Dizzy Gillespie.  

Now, you might say that the libretto is a bit unfocused.  You have this conceit where he wants to create a posthumous masterpiece, but then that never really goes anywhere.  There's not much of a sense of progression.  And yet, I cannot bring myself to hold this against this, because I really loved the opera, and it even seems groundbreaking to me.  Porgy and Bess and Treemonisha both feature strong jazz elements, but I've never seen a piece that embraced the form as wholeheartedly as this does (it is said to mix Schnyder's music with Parker's own compositions, which I must simply accept on faith).  The singing is still obviously operatic, but also featuring jazz idioms (including occasional scat singing).  I thought it was just awesome.  Maybe I actually do like jazz, at least more than I thought?  Really, it's one of the best contemporary operas I've seen.

I liked everything about this Pittsburgh Opera production except...the fact that the singers are all wearing COVID masks.  I mean, I shouldn't complain; I'm very pro-mask, obviously, but man, it does NOT help the artistic experience.  Not being able to see the bottom half of everyone's face really limits the physical expressiveness that's possible.  OH WELL.  For an opera this good, I can overlook it.