The New Orleans Opera Association will come to the New Orleans Jazz Market in January with The Ranney and Emel Songu Mize Chamber Opera Series featuring Daniel Schnyder’s Charlie Parker’s Yardbird. It is based on Charlie Parker’s dream to bridge the worlds of classical and jazz music. The story immediately follows Parker’s death in 1955. With the aid of his strong mother, Addie, three of his four wives, and his partner in the bebop jazz revolution, Dizzy Gillespie, the jazz legend struggles to calm his lifelong demons and write his final masterpiece.

Performances are Friday, January 20, and Saturday, January 21, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, January 22, at 2:30 p.m.. Single tickets range from $25 to $75 and are available online or by calling the box office at (504) 529-3000. Tickets for children and students are $10.00.

A free pre-opera party will begin on Friday and Saturday at 6:15 p.m., followed at 6:30 p.m. by the Opera’s “Nuts and Bolts” pre-performance lecture. On Sunday, the pre-opera party will start at 1:15 p.m., followed at 1:30 p.m. by the Nuts and Bolts pre-performance lecture.

Praised by Opera News as a “vocally charismatic” performer with a “golden tenor,” Martin Bakari, cast as Parker, has distinguished himself in various musical and theatrical genres. He is an alumnus of the master’s degree program at Juilliard, the B.M. and Opera Institute programs at Boston University, and the study-abroad program at London’s Royal College of Music. In the role of Parker’s mother, Addie, internationally acclaimed soprano Angela Brown unites opera, pops and gospel in one voice and has graced the leading opera and symphonic stages across six continents.

Like this opera’s composer, Parker shared a keen enthusiasm for jazz and classical music. During his lifetime, he often expressed the desire to compose something of a very similar form to this opera itself—a hybridization of classical and jazz forms—for a large ensemble. While the opera does not directly feature Charlie Parker’s music, Schnyder interpolates jazz gestures and embeds quotations from Parker’s music in his score. A dreamlike fantasia in two parts (performed without pause), Charlie Parker’s Yardbird is a classical opera that poetically blends fact, speculation, and apocryphal legend.

For more information visit neworleansopera.org.