Testimony Secret Room

 The secret room at Kennedy School is well hidden, and the assignment is to find it. Your only clue: it’s not always accessible – you must check the hours of the small bars.

Charlie Parker
1920-1955
One of the greatest jazz musicians of all time, Charlie Parker lived large and went out with a bang – literally. At the moment of his death, there was a terrific clap of thunder, and “one musician speculated that Parker disintegrated into ‘pure sound.’”¹ He left behind bebop, a new jazz era and generations of musicians who would find inspiration in his improvisational style and music.
 
The Secret Room: A Snapshot
The Testimony Secret Room is an art installation, the focus of which is Yusef Komunyakaa’s 1997 libretto, or poem, “Testimony,” which details the life of jazz saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker. The high-ceilinged space features colorful cityscapes – places where Parker lived or performed – below which unfurl fourteen scrolls filled with the words of Komunyakaa’s poem.
 
Charlie Parker inspired his collaborators as well as musicians who came later, many of whom can be seen in vibrant portraits on one wall. Vivid imagery from the poem dances around the room to the jazz that accompanies this stunning mural.
 
Listen: Podcast Coming Soon
In episode 10 of our podcast The Red Shed Tapes, you’ll get to hear more about the making of the Testimony Secret Room, including the story behind it that is woven with an incredible web of interconnectivity. “A Rainbow Full of Sound” is coming soon wherever you get your podcasts.
 
Artists’ Statement
In 1997, poet Yusef Komunyakaa was commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Company to write “Testimony,” a libretto celebrating the life of jazz musician Charlie Parker. The words were set to music and performed at Sydney’s Opera House in 2002. This poem is the foundation and focus of the Testimony Secret Room at the Kennedy School.
 
In 2024, Sadie and Eddie, a mother-daughter team at JP’s Custom Framing and Gallery in Portland, gave Mike McMenamin a copy of Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker by Yusef Komunyakaa (2013), which includes the libretto, interviews about the project, and other jazz poetry. Mike was deeply moved by the title poem “Testimony.” After having contemplated subject matter for the secret room for over a year, he knew this poem was the inspiration he had been waiting for.
 
The primary subject of the immersive mural is the poem itself, which consists of 14 sections, each with two 14-line stanzas. After initial concept drawings by Cleo Hehn in December 2024, she and Eona Skelton collaborated to create a design that would fill the former storage space with vivid illustrations while also emphasizing the text.
 
With its 17-foot ceilings, the verticality of the room lent itself to skyscrapers and skylines, a painted collage of all the cities in which Charlie Parker lived and performed. Illustrations of the poem’s evocative imagery slide between each hand-lettered poem. Engraved flowers fall from a painting of Parker’s saxophone and become a metallic-colored border around the bottom of the room, leading the viewer to portraits of Parker’s contemporaries and collaborators, as well as those who inspired him and were inspired by his short yet prolific career. Although he only lived to age 34, Parker was one of the primary innovators of bebop, a style that transformed the world of jazz – of music – forever.
 
The room features three portraits of Parker himself: Eona painted him as the central figure on the west wall, she painted him as a child riding a palomino pony beside his mother on the east wall, and Myrna Yoder painted him with his sax on the entrance.
 
After doing extensive research and making detailed drawings, Eona led the initial phase of the mural in June 2025. She and Cleo spent the summer on scaffolding, painting stars on the ceiling and buildings across the walls. Each building is from the poem and Charlie Parker’s life, painted in acrylic paint with fluorescent (blacklight) colors and phosphorescent (glow-in-the-dark) paint to create the illusion of a city lit up at night. The buildings are painted as they would have looked during Parker’s lifetime.
 
In September, Myrna Yoder joined the project, lettering poems alongside Eona and Cleo. Myrna also delineated the three portrait sections on the lower north wall using vibrant fluorescent colors. She painted swirls, dots, lines and triangles in an improvisational style, embodying the spirit of jazz music through abstraction, movement and color.
 
The team moved clockwise around the room, and when they reached the northeast corner, Cleo painted a mango tree with a heart in its center, referencing both the poem and the tree’s heartwood. In the southeast corner, Eona painted an Australian rainbow eucalyptus, referencing the poem while connecting to the location of the libretto’s performance in Sydney.
 
Also in the southeast corner, the tenth poem consists of letters from Parker to his common-law wife Chan upon the death of their three-year-old daughter. Unlike the other poems, which are written on long, parchment-like rectangles, this poem is torn into pieces. The artists chose to rip the paper, so to speak, to represent Parker’s breaking heart and his descent into depression and subsequent return to addiction.
 
Eona completed the cityscape on the south wall. Here, the buildings become disjointed and warped, a riot of color and curves as Parker’s struggle with heroin led him toward his last days. Following the poem’s progression, lightning strikes the Stanhope Hotel, where Parker passed away in the hotel suite of Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a wealthy patron to many New York jazz musicians.
 
While Eona worked on the south wall scaffolding, Cleo painted two-tone monochromatic illustrations between the poems. Although she had sketched many of these images ahead of time, the lettering of the poems on the wall determined the shape of each parchment and the unique shape of each between-space, so Cleo designed these sections as she painted them, quickly drawing then painting emotional and intimate images from the poetry. These images include portraits, including comedian Lenny Bruce, violinist Jascha Heifetz, and conguero Chano Pozo. The final image she painted in these sections is a full-color portrait of Parker’s alto saxophone, complete with the flowers that fall into the border that was designed by Myrna.
 
Eona then returned to the west wall, adding dance halls and nightclubs between the portrait areas and the skyscrapers. These include locations in Portland where Parker performed, as well as McMenamins Crystal Ballroom. The central building is Birdland, the famous New York jazz club named for Parker’s nickname, Bird, or Yardbird.
 
Nearly every poem references this nickname, which may have been given to him after his tour bus hit a chicken that was crossing the road. Every bird species mentioned in the poem is also painted on the walls: hawk, chicken, wood warbler, yellow sapsucker, parrot, black cockatoo, mockingbird, and bird of paradise. This final bird flies toward the heavens over the door.
 
Also over the door, a skeleton raises a glass above a banner featuring the title of the poem and its author. Grateful Dead fans will recognize the iconic skeleton drawn from the famous skull and roses motif by Stanley “Mouse” Miller and Alton Kelly. Mouse and Kelly remixed an engraving by Edmund J. Sullivan that originally appeared in the 1913 edition of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The Rubaiyat, a collection of 11th-century Persian quatrains, was a favorite of Charlie Parker’s, and he was known to recite passages from it. The Grateful Dead were heavily influenced by jazz, musically, and lyrically influenced by The Rubaiyat. The Rubaiyat is mentioned in the final “Testimony” poem, so Cleo painted this homage as the concluding image of the mural.
 
The artists then painted portraits of Parker’s contemporaries and collaborators, as well as his common-law wife Chan Richardson, his patron Baroness Pannonica, and musicians inspired by Parker’s compositions and contributions.
 
Portraits from left to right, top to bottom, by section:
 
Section 1 (left) by Cleo Hehn: Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Yusef Komunyakaa, Max Roach, Fats Waller
 
Section 2 (center) by Eona Skelton: Jay McShann, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Goon Gardner, Ella Fitzgerald, Budd Johnson, Ben Webster, Ted Joans
 
Section 3 (right) by Myrna Yoder: Thelonious Monk, Jerry Garcia, Ornette Coleman, Chan Richardson, Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica de Koenigswarter, Mel Brown, Leroy Vinnegar
 
Finally, Myrna painted her delightful portrait of Parker on a panel that was then attached to the secret door. In this portrait, Parker is laughing while holding his sax. Parker’s life was tragic in many ways, but in most of the photos of him where he wasn't blowing on his horn, he was laughing and smiling. Myrna thought that was a fitting way to honor him at the entrance of the room that is an homage to both Charlie Parker and Yusef Komunyakaa’s stunning poem, “Testimony.”

¹Chuck Haddix, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker (University of Illinois Press, 2013)