653 Chenery Street
in San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood
1-415-586-3733
[email protected]
Open to walk-in trade and browsing
Tuesday to Sunday
noon to six
Live Streams every weekend!
Refresh your browser to catch a show in progress!
Visit our Facebook page or YouTube channel!
But nothing beats being in the room with the music & the musicians!
Bob Kenmotsu, tenor saxophone Keith Saunders, piano Matt Montgomery, bass Tony Johnson, drums $20 suggested donation, byob. Teens and music students, $5-10 sliding scale Kids free Australian native Tony Johnson arrived on these shores in 1959, sneaking into the U.S. from British Columbia and quickly becoming a fixture on the North Beach jazz scene. He was first heard on record on an album recorded live at the Coffee Gallery on Grant Avenue in 1960 by vocalist Bev Kelly with Pony Poindexter on saxophone and Flip Nuñez on piano, produced for Riverside Records by Orrin Keepnews. Not a bad start! He’s been swinging ever since. Habitués of the legendary Club Deluxe well remember the countless nights in the first couple of decades of this century when he ruled the venue’s bandstand from behind the drumkit, carrying all the City’s best young jazz players to ecstatic levels of performance. This evening, Tony’s…
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Laura Dreyer – saxophone and flute Marcos Silva – piano Richard Lindsey- bass Kelly Fasman – drums $20 cover charge; byob. Reservations: 415-586-3733 Saxophonist, flutist and composer Laura Dreyer is a vibrant and widely acclaimed voice in the New York and global jazz scene. Her compositions combine lyrical melodies with jazz, Brazilian rhythms, funk and rock, and she’s been called to work for Dr. Billy Taylor, Dom Salvador, Helcio Milito, Portinho, Walter Bishop Jr., Mel Lewis, Robert Palmer, Nnenna Freelon, James McBride, The Diva Jazz Orchestra and many others. Laura has headlined at the Kennedy Center’s “Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival,” and The Syracuse Jazz Festival, as well as many NYC venues including The Blue Note, Ornithology, Sweet Rhythm, Birdland, The Zinc Bar, The Roxy Hotel, and many others. She’s released four CDs as a leader/producer, including Mysterious Encounter (Lavasphere), Free Flying Bird (Sony/Piloo), Sax in the City…
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Noel Jewkes, saxes Grant Levin, piano Robb Fisher, bass Mark Lee, drums with guest vocalist Kay Kostopoulos $20 cash cover charge, byob. Reservations, call 415-586-3733 Noel is now the grand old man of San Francisco saxophone, with a career spanning six to seven decades. They call him Dr. Legato, for his lovely long saxophone lines and graceful phrasing. His companions on the bandstand are first-call players who have worked alongside Noel for years, and the chemistry will be evident from the first tune. Joined by the sultry and emotive vocalist Kay Kostopoulos, whose rapport with Noel is complete, the quartet will offer two sets of jazz standards, bossas and Noel’s original compositions.
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All jazz players welcome! No charge to play. Audience, your donations allow us to pay the hosting trio members a fair wage for their labor. Drummer Vince Lateano, bassist Peter Barshay and pianist Ben Stolorow set the stage and relinquish their instruments to anyone with the chops and nerve to join in the long tradition that is the jam session. Players come together to find common ground and individual expression, drawing on musical language and tunes that generations of jazz players have made into standards.
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Marvin Carter, saxophone. Ingbar Solomon, saxophone. Tamir Lifshitz, guitar. Lillian Charlotte Stern, bass. Gary Jones III, percussion. $20 cover charge; byob. Reservations, 415-586-3733. Lily Stern has just completed her degree in music at the New School in Manhattan, and is home this summer, preparing her debut album and playing at venues this weekend from Mr. Tipples on Saturday to Oaktown Jazz Workshops and Bird & Beckett on Sunday. Catch her before she flies away! Lily is a bassist, composer, vocalist and producer who came highly recommended by two friends of Bird & Beckett, both titans of local jazz and champions/mentors of young talent — drummer Myron Cohen and saxophonist Richard Howell. Born and raised in the Bay Area, Lillian Charlotte Stern was immersed at a young age in music from funk, American folk and rock to traditional jazz, Afro Cuban jazz, Timba, and Hindustani music. The granddaughter of saxophonist and…
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Alice Elizabeth Rogoff grew up in New Rochelle, New York. She lives in the Sunnyside District of San Francisco near Bird and Beckett. Her poetry book Mural won a Blue Light Book Award. Her other books of poetry are Materials, Painting the Cat’s Vision, and the newest, City Canyons. Painting the Cat’s Vision was a semi-finalist in the Codhill Poetry Contest. From the San Francisco Arts Commission, she received a Cultural Equity Commission for a poetry project about local women labor organizers. Her poetry has appeared in Borderlands (Texas Poetry Review), Poetry Pacific, Blue Collar Review, Pudding Magazine and Swerve from Ireland. She has an MA in Creative Writing and is the Co-editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. Antoinette Vella Payne, a San Francisco native, hosts 1428 Poets, a monthly open mic reading at 1428 Haight St in San Francisco, and is a regular participant at Sacred Grounds, the longest running weekly poetry venue in San…
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Dred Scott, a Bay Area to NYC transplant, is known for his stylistically reckless repertoire and a penchant for covering pop tunes. Since moving to NYC from the Bay Area, he’s gained a reputation on both coasts as an innovative and eclectic pianist and multi-instrumentalist. Dred has been based in NYC for 23 years and is gradually cobbling together the remnants of his pre-Covid musical life. He was the house pianist at Del Posto for 8 years until Covid and some only-in-NY factors closed them down. His 2023 release, The Pacific Jazz Group, on Ropeadope Records.features Bay Area stars Eric Crystal, John Wiitala and Smith Dobson, digging into the west coast jazz sound that made up much of Pacific Jazz catalog. Cali Mambo, inspired by the George Shearing/Cal Tjader collaborations of the 1950s is in the pipeline. In the ’90s, here in the Bay Area, Dred co-founded the ground-breaking hip-hop jazz group Alphabet…
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Stephen Vincent reads from Sleeping with Sappho and The Golden Book. Michael Wolfe reads from Cut These Words Into Stone. Sleeping With Sappho is the enigmatic title of Stephen Vincent’s poems that imagine and explore the dramas that emerge from a radical re-making of Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho, If Not, Winter. Peter Manson, the Scottish poet writes, ‘I love the way you seem to load all the dice against the possibility of this being a personal, expressive work, by foregrounding the process and the workings against the source text, and I also love the way that leads to it ending up as personal and expressive a book as anyone could have made. The most fragmentary poems often have a great goofiness about them, and that gives a real zest and leavening to the whole thing. It’s such a complex act of overlaying of your present perceptual field, your memories and desires,…
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Music journalist Jeff Kaliss returns to Bird & Beckett to present his deep dive into the world of Sly Stone and his band, revised & updated for a new edition just published by Backbeat Books, with George Clinton’s preface and a new forward by Ricky Vincent. From his anthemic early hits (“I Want to Take You Higher,” “Family Affair,” “Dance to the Music”), through the moody meditations of the band’s 1971 lp, There’s a Riot Going On and beyond, Sly & the Family Stone left an indelible stamp on rock, funk, pop, and hip hop, and their enigmatic frontman in particular continues to inspire fascination and speculation. This fully updated edition fills in the gaps since the book’s original 2008 publication, including Sly’s successful legal action against his former manager, the death of band member (and mother of a child with Sly) Cynthia Robinson, and the new projects undertaken by family…
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August dates will include the Dred Scott Trio…the Ron Vincent Trio…Maurice Tani with American bassist Mike Anderson…The Elé Salif Howell Quartet…Eytan & Gabriel Schillinger-Hyman…Brian Melvin…a Two Way Mirror reading …Rojai in the Pocket…Duncan James’ George Barnes Experience…Hafez Modirzadeh…Sharman Duran’s Alternate Realities…and more!
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We have so many plans, so many commitments and so little to rely on save hard work, luck and fate! Make your mark on the culture by staking us to our plans, schemes, habits and dreams! Jazz and poetry don’t pay well in this alternative reality we call capitalism! It’s the hardscrabble commitment of the average citizen and the largesse of the few that allow organizations like ours to pay the artists AND keep the lights on. Thank you those who have our back! We do it for you and with you, and for and with the artists. If a tax deduction is a high priority for you, you’ll want to wait awhile before cutting us a check. We understand that, and in a few months we’ll have our nonprofit status back, we’re quite sure. Meanwhile, this drive is a pitch for non-deductible donations! The Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy…
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Hungry to hear some of Bird & Beckett’s past live streams? On the home page you can scroll down to read the individual posts for the shows we’ve mounted in the past several months, a hint of what’s gone down since the pandemic lock-down began. In more amazing times, it would take you right back to the very first show of the current period, back on March 12, 2020, but that beautiful skein is no longer quite so easily accessed. Still, the evidence is there for those who dig. The March 12, 2020 show that signaled the shift was a Thursday evening performance by New York saxophonists Jessica and Tony Jones, both alumni of the Berkeley High jazz program, with NYC bassist Stomu Takeishi and local hero Deszon X. Claiborne on drums. The quartet’s booking for the night before at the Backroom over in Berkeley had been cancelled. A few…
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Bird & Beckett’s events open to the public have been back since mid-June 2021. Mask up if you’re inclined, and do come in! (Not vaxxed? Please get vaxxed and be safer!) Jazz, poetry & more live in the shop and live streamed Come to 653 Chenery if you’re in town! Doors open at 7:20 for our 7:30 shows. $20 cover for trios and quartets $25 for quintets, $30 for sextets, etc. Cash at the door please! BYOB and BYOglass, and pack out what you pack in! Please feel free to wear a mask in the shop. We trust the science and its processes, and we trust SF’s DPH to keep us up to date on best practices! Advised best practices as of early September 2021 was to wear a mask indoors around people. If that makes you a little more comfortable being inside this winter, then do feel free. Sure…
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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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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." We've been doing that very thing for more than a decade and a half, continuing the work we began when the store was established in 1999.
Due to lapses in tax filings during and post-pandemic, the BBCLP's status as a registered nonprofit was suspended at the beginning of April 2024 while we reapply, which is expected to take about six months. Donations made after April 1st will not be tax-deductible until nonprofit status is restored.
However, we continue to present a full slate of programming live music and poetry, and producing literary chapbooks, and we seek and welcome your continued financial support in the interim. If a tax-deduction is not a major reason for your support to date, we hope you'll continue to ride with us while we navigate these next several months.
Click on "donate" in the navigation bar above, drop off a check at the bookshop, or drop one in the mail 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.
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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
