Author Joel Eis, hosted and introduced by poet, bandleader, musicologist and KPFA/KPOO dj Avotcja, presents his memoir, Standin’ in a Hard Rain: The Making of a Revolutionary Life.
Thursday 9/14 at 7pm
Joel Eis has a bookshop with a radical bent in San Rafael called Rebound, writes science fiction, and has had a long career in theater production and education, with an overriding commitment to political theater and activism. His memoir “is a useful and compelling read as the nation once again tries to find its bearings.” –David Harris, journalist and activist.

Threeocracy plays the music of the Lucky Thompson /
Oscar Pettiford collaborations of 1956.
Friday 9/14 at 5:30pm – $20 suggested / byob
Bassist Oscar Pettiford’s tune Tricotism is the centerpiece of two 1956 recording dates with saxophonist Lucky Thompson. Pettiford (1922-1960) was a key bassist in the birth of bebop, jamming in 1942 at Minton’s Playhouse alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clark; Thompson (1924-2005) played alongside Dizzy and Charlie Parker in Billy Eckstein’s orchestra in 1944, and was one of the great saxophone voices throughout the bop and hard bop era and beyond.
Threeocracy digs deep into the Thompson/Pettiford conceptions, compositions and collaborations, with Tom Griesser on tenor saxophone, Scott Foster on guitar and Scott Chapek on bass.
BYOB and a twenty for the band. Can’t spare a twenty? We understand. Do what you can. For the Friday happy hour shows (weekly, 5:30 to 8pm), it’s voluntary. Economics shouldn’t dictate access to culture. Well heeled and want to help us afford that stance? Donate to our nonprofit. Sustaining monthly donations are particularly helpful.

The Jayla / Andrew SF B&B Jamtet
Friday 9/15 at 9pm. The late show!
$20 cover / byob
Jayla Chee and Andrew Stephens, two young players out of San Francisco, both now based in NYC, come back to town for a date with guitarist Kai Lyons and drummer Michael Mitchell. Actually, it’s not quite that simple. Jayla grew up in the Bay Area, but headed for Julliard in NYC a few years ago and is based there now. Andrew grew up in Sacramento, raised in the community that created and has sustained an internationally treasured trad jazz festival since 1968. He spent a couple of great years in San Francisco, for which we count ourselves very lucky, before heading to NYC for the greater good of his career. But that San Francisco and environs could equal the potential of New York! Still, facts is facts, and the fact is that the Bay Area has enough to offer that he and Jayla often return, and that Mike Mitchell, born and raised in Brooklyn, moved here to Oakland a couple of years ago, with a stint teaching in Mumbai along the way. As for Kai, born and raised in San Francisco’s Excelsior District, he spent a productive year or two at William Paterson University just outside NYC then finished his B.Mus. at SFSU, and before and since has traveled widely for his musical education, to Cuba, Africa and elsewhere, and his home remains here, in San Francisco.
It’s for musicians like these four that we join with colleagues to champion regional fair wage & working conditions standards that can make a career in the Bay Area a viable reality. Support our efforts with an email to your district supervisor to find out where the City stands on the issue!

The Joe McKinley Quartet
Saturday 9/16 at 7:30pm – $20 cover / byob
OG jazz veterans reprise their date from last July, with Charlie McCarthy on saxophone, Sam Cady on piano and the younger cat Alexey Berlind on drums. Despite the odds, these four musicians show that San Francisco and environs have qualities that can make a departure to other markets out of the question; not, you understand, that they probably haven’t all ruefully considered the idea! Fabulous players steeped in our local culture and contributing so much to it! If only they could rest here in San Francisco for eternity… read on to discover why the eternity part isn’t so viable!

Writer Beth Winegarner presents her book,
San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History
Sunday 9/17 at 3pm
In the early 20th Century, the city relocated more than 150,000 graves to the nearby town of Colma to make way for a rapidly growing population. But an estimated fifty to sixty thousand burials were quietly built over and forgotten, only to resurface every time a new building project began.  Beth Winegarner digs up the story, in conversation with Courtney Minick, of “Here Lies a Story.” Here’s a link to a great article about Beth & her book by Glen Park journalist Bonnee Waldstein.

The Vince Lateano Trio
Sunday 9/17 at 5pm – $20 suggested/byob
Vince arrived in San Francisco from Sacramento in 1965 and was the house drummer at Pearl’s throughout the 1990s until Pearl closed it in 2003. He’s long been at the center of the San Francisco jazz scene, and has a residency leading his trio with bassist Peter Barshay and pianist Ben Stolorow at Bird & Beckett on the third Sunday of each month. Mark your calendar, too, for the last Sunday of each month, when the trio hosts a jam session, also at 5pm. For the Sunday 5pm shows, we ask that you help pay the musicians, noting that a twenty is pretty much what it takes, if you can possibly afford it. Pay what you can, and bring something to sip if you think all this art and culture might make you thirsty!