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653 Chenery Street in San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood
Open to walk-in trade and browsing Tuesday to Sunday noon to six
phone: 1-415-586-3733 email: [email protected]
Andrew Paul Nelson is a poet living in North Beach where he owns and operates Golden Sardine with his wife Caitlyn. His book of poems How to Draw A Guillotine was released by Living Poets in 2024. Mukethe Kawinzi is a transsexual goatherder and land steward working at the intersection of the pastoral, modern Black agrarianism, queer identity, and contemporary rural life. He has farmed in sustainable and organic agriculture for six years, with a focus on artisanal cheesemaking, non-violent livestock handling, and regenerative grazing. He is the author of ‘touching grass’ (Porkbelly Press), ‘Koans to a Young Cowboi’ (Bottlecap Press), ‘rut’ (Ghost City Press Summer Series), and ‘saanens, nubians, one lamancha’ (Winner, Quarterly West Chapbook Contest), as well as the winner of the inaugural ALOCASIA Grant for Queer Nature Writers. He currently traverses the open range with a herd of 300 Spanish cashmere range goats to restore coastal prairie, rehabilitate degraded soils, and mitigate the effects of climate change on California…
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Four shows this weekend, detailed below, with the Jon Frank Trio leading off Friday at 7:30pm, followed by UFO Pilots, a trio, Saturday at 7:30, The Maurice Tani Band Sunday at 5pm, and singer Kay Kostoloupos with the Noel Jewkes Quartet Sunday at 7:30pm. Scroll down for details. Friday, August 7th, 7:30pm: Jon Frank Trio — Grant Levin, piano; Chris Amberger, bass; Jon Frank, drums. $20 cover. Standards and jazz versions of Jewish songs from a trio that’s developed a solid rapport. Chris Amberger came of age in Oakland in the late ’60s and did a stint with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. He’s been a force on the Northern California jazz scene for decades. His frequent collaborator Grant Levin while a student at the University of Nevada at Reno met Chris, when the bassist was judging a student competition. Grant went on to a productive period teaching at Chico State…
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August 13th, 7:30pm: São Paulo Choro Quartet featuring Alessandro Penezzi & Alexandre Ribeiro — Brazilian choro by São Paulo Allstars! Alessandro Penezzi, guitar; Roberta Valente, pandeiro; Alexandre Ribeiro, clarinet; Jane Lenoir, flute. $25-$35 sliding scale cover. _____ August 14th, 7:30pm: Mose Def : The Music of Mose Allison — Dean Mermell, vocals; Tom Griesser, tenor sax; Kymry Esainko, piano; Joe Kyle, Jr., bass; Eric Garland, drums. $25 cover. Students $10. _____ August 15th, 7:30pm: Nathan Tokunaga Quartet — Nathan Tokunaga, reeds; Charles Chen, piano; Mikiya Matsuda, bass; Benny Amon, drums. $20 cover. Students $10. _____ August 16th, 5pm (the happy hour show): The 230 Jones Street Band — Charlie McCarthy, saxophone; Sam Cady, piano; Chuck Bennett, bass; Tony Johnson, drums. It’s Happy Hour. Stay for a tune, stay for a set; pay what you can, pay what you will! Students $10. _____ August 16th, 7:30pm: Nate Gilbreath and Alan Jones’s OHANA Collective…
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The posts that follow show you what’s come and gone. Search the videos on our youtube channel or facebook page to find evidence of what you remember, or what you missed! Then, make sure you catch the next thing that catches your fancy. The live streams are great, but live music in a room with folks you know or ought to get to know, that’s irreplaceable…
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Joel Behrman, trumpet. Rico Jones, saxophone. Matt Clark, piano Essiet Okon Essiet, bass. Sylvia Cuenca, drums. $25 cover charge / byob. Students $10. For a reservation, call the bookshop at 415-586-3733. Sylvia Cuenca, born and raised in San Jose, was called while still in her teenage years for her first professional gig by the late, great guitarist Eddie Duran at the original iteration of Jazz at Pearl’s, when it was an afterhours club in the basement of the Great Eastern Restaurant in Chinatown. Pearl’s moved up and over onto Broadway where it had a 13-year long run as San Francisco’s most important jazz club from 1990 to its closure in 2003. Sylvia headed for NYC in the late 1980s and established a stellar career that included a four-year stint as saxophone legend Joe Henderson’s drummer, and a seventeen-year run as the drummer for trumpeter Clark Terry’s band. She’s bi-coastal…
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Sunday, August 2nd – 5pm Jam Session! The Sai Ray Quartet — Sai Ray, trumpet; Armaan Mishra, piano; Yoav Konig, bass; Nicholas DiMaria; drums– plays a set and hosts the August edition of our First Sundays Student-Centric Jam Session. It’s Happy Hour. Pay what you will! Donate to the BBCLP to underwrite our emerging musicians programming and support the future of jazz in San Francisco! _____
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Flavia Cerviño-Wood, violin Andrew Voigt, woodwinds Derek Coombs, piano Harold Carr, bass and compositions Susanna Goldenstein, percussion. Album release concert celebrating A Bird Is Whiter Than The Moon. Everyone who attends will receive a free copy of the album! $25 cover charge / byob for adults — cash at the door, please! Students $10. For a reservation, call the bookshop at 415-586-3733. Harold Carr has performed and recorded with numerous artists such as Bobby McFerrin, Crystal Gayle, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John McCuen, Steve Lacy, Catie Curtis, Matt Flinner, Alan Braufman, Gino Robair and Andrew Voigt. Harold has been a musician/poet-in-residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, guest soloist at the Frutillar Music Festival in Chile, composer/soloist with the Guangdong Modern Dance Company in Guang Zhou, China, invited poet for the Utah State Governor at the Governor’s Mansion, commissioned composer/performer at New Music America and artist-in-residence at Zion Canyon Mesa. He has worked with the Windolls Theatre of Images in…
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The Jazz Therapy Trio brings together three seasoned Bay Area musicians for an evening of introspective, lyrical jazz. Pianist Ben Stolorow leads the ensemble, drawing on classical influences and modern jazz sensibilities shaped by studies with Fred Hersch, Stanley Cowell, and David Hazeltine. A UC Berkeley graduate and Jazzschool faculty member, Stolorow has performed at Yoshi’s, Kuumbwa Jazz Center, and festivals throughout the Bay Area and Japan. The SF Chronicle describes him as “a pianist with a gift for crafting alluring melodies that cry out for lyrics” who “interprets every piece with poise and purpose.” On bass is Heshima Mark Williams, a native San Franciscan and a neighbor of the store when we first opened in 1999, living in Berkeley now. As a youth, he studied under the first classical bassist in the Boston Symphony, Dr. Ortiz Walton, and through the five decades since, he’s played with countless top musicians from Taj…
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Jam sessions in San Francisco have a history as long as jazz has been played here. From the Barbary Coast to the present day, the session is one of the key ways the music has refreshed itself and brought old hands and young pups together. Vince Lateano has led a lot of them in his time and has been leading ours for years, a practice he’s carried from Pier 23 to the Dog Patch Saloon to the Seven Mile House to Sweetie’s Art Bar. Come enjoy the hearing the tradition unfold. No charge to play. Audience donations appreciated to help us pay the trio for its work!
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A preview of a work in progress with Linda Champagne, Carla Diamond, Trudy Fisher, Lori Gates, Patty Haze, David Katznelson, Harry Levy, Linda Ryan, Sue Sponge and special guests. Memwah is Howie Klein’s printed and photographed recollections of his life well-lived. Tasked with finishing a book upon his death in December 2025, award-winning columnist Denise Sullivan has gathered a cast of friends from his San Francisco years at KSAN, KUSF and 415 Records, to read the ’70s and ’80s portions of Klein’s memoir aloud, speak to the causes he cared about, and spin the records he loved. From the tenements of New York and its downtown psychedelic scene, on the hippie trail through Afghanistan and India, to a vegan kitchen in Amsterdam, by the mid-’70s, Klein found himself at Harvey Milk’s camera store on Castro Street, and at the center of San Francisco’s mid-’70s social, political and musical scenes. Working…
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Join us in celebrating Avotcja’s 85th birthday! Poet, Musicologist, Disc Jockey, Small Percussionist, Prose Writer in Many Genres, Culture Hero! Avotcja’s award-winning group Modúpue (Gratitude) is an ensemble that stretches to as many players as well fit a venue Tonight, Modúpue is: Avotcja, poetry and small multi-percussion. Sandi Poindexter, violin. Jon Jang, piano. Francis Wong, saxophone and flute. Heshima Mark Williams, bass. Raul Ramirez, multi-percussion. The cover charge for the sextet tonight is $25-35 sliding scale, cash or venmo, payable at the door / byob. College and high school students – $10. Grade school and younger, free. No one turned away for lack of funds. Wheelchair accessible. Avotcja was named “Jazz Hero” by the West Coast Chapter of the Jazz Journalists Association in 2015 and was in the same year awarded the JaZzline Institute BAJABA Lifetime Achievement Award and the PEN Oakland Lifetime Achievement Award. She has also been the…
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Kasey Knudsen, saxophone. Harvey Wainapel, saxophone. John Wiitala, bass. Jon Arkin, drums. $20 cover charge (cash at the door, please); byob. Students $10; kids free. For reservation, call the bookshop at 415-586-3733 Kasey Knudsen and Harvey Wainapel, highly accomplished saxophonists acclaimed for their work in diverse genres and their mastery of the full range of wind instruments, join forces across generations in this new quartet setting with equally talented and experienced colleagues, bassist John Wiitala and drummer Jon Arkin, to perform a thoughtfully selected repertoire that works well in a “chordless” setting, without piano or guitar — music that’s at once accessible and fascinating in its complexity. These four jazz musicians have long been mutual admirers and frequent collaborators while traveling individual paths in their careers. They’ve developed a unique quartet that they’re excited to bring to Bird & Beckett in its public debut. Harvey Wainapel, the senior partner in…
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Eli Yamin, piano & vocal. Roberta Donnay, vocal. Simon Planting, bass. Sylvia Cuenca, drums. $20 cover charge at the door, cash please! And bring your own beverage; we have cups, openers, etc. Student cover charge is $10. Kids free. Eli Yamin (widely known as “Dr. E”) is out from New York City to play blues, bebop and swing — topical original songs mixed with classics by Thelonious Monk, Elizabeth Cotten, and Willie Dixon. A very bluesy jazz pianist and cultural ambassador, Dr. E’s joyful style has taken him from performances with Mercedes Ellington, Illinois Jacquet and Walter Perkins to four appearances with his own band at the White House for the Obamas and ten global tours for the U.S. Department of State. His work embraces jazz as a tool for community building and social justice built on the idea that “the blues is the roots, everything else is the fruits.”…
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David Oppenheimer is a clinical professor of law at Berkeley Law, director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law and faculty co-director of the pro bono program. He is the author of ten books on civil rights and discrimination law, including the first law school casebook in comparative equality law. The Diversity Principle (Yale University Press, 2026), the work of a diversity skeptic turned admirer, chronicles how diversity became a foundational value of higher education over the last two hundred years, how it evolved as it was adopted in commerce and science, and the implications of the current backlash. The diversity principle–the idea that people with different backgrounds, experiences, identities, and viewpoints produce better work by engaging with one another–was a core tenet of the first modern research university, founded in Germany in 1810. It was the inspiration for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, a touchstone of academic freedom; a hallmark of Charles Eliot’s remaking of…
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Make Bird & Beckett a habit Sundays at 5pm! Stay for a tune, stay for two sets — whatever suits your Sunday! Just byob and a friend or two and have a nice time in the neighborhood. Contribute what you can to the kitty so we can pay these fine musicians, but don’t stress. Our donors have your back. Become one yourself, if you’re flush. It’s good for you, and it’s good for the culture! This week, Peck Allmond comes back for visit. Born in Rochester, NY, Peck was raised in Berkeley, a 1980 graduate of the storied Berkeley High jazz program that gave the jazz world the likes of David Murray, Will Bernard, Craig Handy, Benny Green, Peter Apfelbaum, Joshua Redman. Now, he’s a New York guy who’s performed with Oliver Lake, Meshell NdegeOcello, Peter Apfelbaum, Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, Joe Lovano, James Carter, Jimmy Smith, Benny Green, Richie…
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SUPPORT BIRD & BECKETT - DONATE TODAY!
Your donation to the Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project helps us pay for a multitude of operating expenses necessary to present, promote and preserve local music, poetry, and more.
Help us keep the arts alive and thriving!
The Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project was created in 2007 "to present, document and archive the creative work of significant living writers and musicians in the San Francisco Bay Area, for a neighborhood audience and future generations," continuing the work we began when the store was established in 1999.
We continue to present a full slate of programming of live music and poetry readings, and produce a literary journal and poetry chapbooks, and we seek and welcome your continued financial support by way of donations.
Click on "donate" in the navigation bar above. Better yet, make a check out to the “Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project” and drop it off or mail it to:
Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project
653 Chenery Street
San Francisco, CA 94131
Call us at (415) 586-3733 to find out how else you might lend your support.
The Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project
Our events are put on under the umbrella of the Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project (the "BBCLP"). That's how we fund our ambitious schedule of 300 or so concerts and literary events every year.
The BBCLP is a [Read More ]
The Independent Musicians Alliance
Gigging musicians! You have nothing to lose but your lack of a collective voice to achieve fair wages for your work!
The IMA can be a conduit for you, if you join in to make it work.
https://www.independentmusiciansalliance.org/
Read more here - Andy Gilbert's Feb 25 article about the IMA from KQED's site
