Coming up now at Bird & Beckett!

 Jazz in the bookshop on Friday… and every Friday
always 5:30 to 8:00 pm

never a cover charge, but we always implore you to contribute what you can to help us pay the musicians, who deserve far more than they ever receive.  They give us so much; this is our chance to give them a little something back!

The Third Quintet!

Friday, Feb. 17, series founders Chuck Peterson (sax), Scott Foster (guitar) and Don Prell (bass) are joined by drummer Omar Aran for two sets of bebop with a west coast lineage… Chuck and Don both got their start in the music in the early 1950s and have been playing jazz at a high level ever since.  Scott and Omar have been top players for only a couple decades each…  You’ll dig it.

Sundays before and after,

The San Francisco Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival co-presents, with our which way west? series, two consecutive Sunday shows at Bird & Beckett!!

Sundays, February 12th and 19th – 4:30 to 6:30 pm

Sunday, Feb. 12th — The Juncos

“Ripping their way through the American roots music landscape in high-energy style, the Santa Cruz-based Juncos are a down-home band that is more throwback than revival. With an appreciation for the acoustic life and a gather-’round-the-mic-y’all recording style, this is a group that understands the strength of a good song and how to let it stand on it’s own. They can coax the sweet out of some harmonies, get the floorboards jumping with their foot-stomping tunes and wind their way through just about any roots-based genre. From jug music and rockabilly to folk, honkytonk and old-timey, the Juncos whip up a thick and hearty musical stew.” – SC Weekly, June 2011

Sunday, Feb. 19th — Dark Hollow

Dark Hollow performs traditional favorites and slam-bang originals with equal gusto. The group’s virtuoso musicianship, love of tunes, melodies, harmonies and drivingbluegrass rhythms blends together to make a traditional sound spiced up with a bit of home-grown joie de vivre, powered by the vocals of leader John Kornhauser.

Info on the entire Blues & Old-Time Festival line-up can be found at this link.  The Festival runs from Feb. 10 to 19th at venues all over town.

 

Join us and debut novelist Tupelo Hassman for a book launch party, with live music — Saturday, February 18th – 7 pm to 9 pm

The author: Tupelo Hassman
The book: Girlchild (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2012)
The band: Buckeye Knoll

“Life is a crazy risk, a foolish venture, a journey hardly worth attempting by poor daughters raised by poor daughters who have no maps or guidebooks (and no teeth, either), who receive no justice that doesn’t hurt about the same as the injustice it means to remedy. This story is your worst white nightmare. Tupelo Hassman’s GIRLCHILD is a triumph and a philosophical treatise on survival.” –Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of National Book Critics Circle and National Book Award Finalist American Salvage

 

Author Alan Kaufman in conversation with publisher & writer Brenda Knight on his new memoir, Drunken Angel — Sunday, February 19th – 2:00 pm

Alan Kaufman is a renowned writing coach here in the Bay Area, teaching countless writers the art of the memoir.  He is also a skilled novelist (Matches), memoirist (Jew Boy)  and anthologist (The Outlaw Book of American Poetry, editor, and The Outlaw Book of American Literature, co-editor with Barney Rosset).  Alan’s new book, Drunken Angel, is “the story of a rebel poet’s climb from drunken hell to reclaim the gift he betrayed and to find the daughter he abandoned.”

Brenda Knight, author of Women of the Beat Generation and publisher of Viva Editions and Cleis Press, has done much as a writer to deepen our understanding of the Bay Area literary heritage and as a publisher to expand on that mission by bringing important new voices into print.

View a YouTube piece on Alan and Brenda discussing Alan’s work at this link.

 

Les Gottesman/Bill Crossman – poetry/piano – plus open mic — Monday, February 20th, 7 p.m.

Les Gottesman‘s first published poems were in Ted Berrigan’s C magazine in 1965. More recently, his poems have appeared in Juked, Beatitude, Harper’s,Antioch Review, and Columbia Review. Les has been a teacher and political activist in San Francisco for over 30 years. He received his MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts in 2011. Website: lesgottesman.com

Bill Crossman is a poet, jazz pianist/composer, human rights activist, professor, and author. “John Brown’s Truth,” a musical theater piece he created which includes his poetry, will be performed in 2012 in the Bay Area. Bill frequently performs with violinist India Cooke (India Cooke-Bill Crossman Duo) and with the Troublemakers Union band. At Bird & Beckett, Bill will be reading new poems from his Sound Ground: Poems for the Years Since 9/11.