Darren Johnston, trumpet.
Bruce Ackley, reeds.
Scott Foster, guitar.

$20/byob.
Students/teens – $10. Kids free.
Reservations, call 415-586-3733.

Scott steps out! The long-time cornerstone of our Friday jazz in the bookshop since 2002, Scott Foster brings all manner of jazz combos every third Friday, and this time out he’s invited two players whose renown in spontaneous improvisation and abstract compositional strategies have made them much loved on both coasts and abroad.

Bruce Ackley is one-fourth of the saxophone quartet Rova, which has traveled the festival circuit for decades drawing inspiration from the likes of John Cage, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, Charles Ives, Edgard Varése, and Olivier Messiaen. Rova has been on the Bird & Beckett stage twice in the past, and Bruce has taken the stage in a variety of other combinations, as has his Rova partner Larry Ochs. Here’s a link to an Ackley/Foster outing from 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHItkXkugPg&t=65s

Darren Johnston’s trumpet is heard in adventuresome combos across the country and around the world in playing all sorts of jazz plus purely improvised music, new music, and traditional forms from the Balkans, Greece and Macedonia. His bread and butter just now if a globe trotting reggae band, but he’s always game to play jazz, the less pigeonholed the better. He is especially drawn to music that tends to defy categorization, witness the many performances he’s turned in on the Bird & Beckett stage in the past decade. Here’s a recent sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7F6wxF6lfk&t=4s.

Check your preconceptions at the door and come on in! It’ll be fun.