Saturday (4/12) from 7:30-9:30pm, the Levit-Behrman Quintet, with Joel Behrman, trumpet; Jesse Levit, alto sax; Matt Clark, piano; Josh Thurston-Milgrom, bass; Jeff Marrs, drums. There’s a lot to be said about this quintet and its fine, well-traveled personnel. Suffice to say, they’re coming in tight and rehearsed. Read a whole lot more on the calendar linked from the Events button up above on this website! $25 cover charge, byob.___________

Sunday (4/13) from 7:00-9:00 pm, the Jim Nichols / Charlie Keagle Duo. This is going to be a lovely date, as guitarist Nichols and reed player Keagle engage as a duo with exquisite music guaranteed. $20 cover charge, byob.

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Already in town? Muni will get you here quick.

Out in the Far East Bay or South Bay? There’s BART.

Up in the North Country? We got bridges and surface streets!

Languishing in Cap d’Antibe or Paris? Rome, Kolkata or Cuzco? Jet into SFO, then hop BART and you’re here.

Read on for a take on this month’s calendar, then mark your own! It’s the Gatsby Centennial, take note!

As a rule, the shop is closed Mondays, but this April the doors are open every day at noon including Mondays so we can play an hour of Senator Cory Booker’s thumping of Trump in his marathon Senate floor drubbing that closed out March and made a fool of that f*cker-in-chief for April Fool’s Day. We’ve been playing the speech back an hour at a time each day starting April 2nd and will continue ’til we’ve played it all–that will take us to April 26th. For those in need of an evening pick me up, we’ll also play an hour on four consecutive April Mondays at 7pm. C’mon down. Bring a friend and a beverage of your choice and join us!

As for the shows to come…

It’s the Gatsby Centennial, so grab a copy and refresh your memory of a signature piece of American literature in these roaring ’20s! The Great Gatsby was published in April 1925. The Great Depression didn’t hit ’til ’29, but at the rate Trump is destroying America we should expect to get there much quicker in this 21st Century! In any case, we don’t know about you, but we’re depressed right now, though our toes are tappin’! So much great music in the shop…

 

But we digress!

Gatsby at 100! Two big events at Bird & Beckett this month that revolve around Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, his masterpiece and his world…

April 20th join us for scholar & teacher Richard Gabri’s take on The Great Gatsby as a passing narrative, a revelation that transforms our understanding of this canonical American novel. Gabri and his high school students recently delved into the allusions in Fitzgerald’s novel to Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of Narcissus that indicate that Fitzgerald viewed Jay Gatsby as not only a social impostor but a man passing as white. Gabri’s thesis is not unprecedented, but it’s a view that’s been only broached a few times in the massive body of Gatsby scholarship, met each time with icy silence by the academic community. Gabri and his young Bentley School students spent a semester in groundbreaking research that builds on scholar Carlyle Van Thompson’s work. Their findings, which will soon be published in the prestigious English Literary History journal, reveal overlooked clues about Gatsby’s racial identity that Fitzgerald deliberately embedded in his novel. Intrigued? Come to the shop at 3pm on Sunday April 20th to hear more from Gabri and some of his students, and pepper them with your questions!

April 30th, we’re pleased to present a book release party for short story writer & cartoonist Janice Shapiro with her debut graphic novel fresh out from Fantagraphics, Honoria: A Fortuitous Friendship. It’s the summer of 1929 when young Ida is sent by her father from their New York home to stay with Gerald and Sara Murphy and their daughter at the Murphys’ Cap d’Antibes villa, where a constellation of gadflies flit about the Murphys and their good friends Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, not to mention the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter and Pablo Picasso, reveling through the nights and languishing in the sun on the beach by day.

For sheltered and unsophisticated Ida, the Murphys’ daughter Honoria becomes both her mentor and her tormentor, as well as her role model and, finally, her friend. Achingly sad and effortlessly funny, full of the kind of youthful sincerity unclouded by pretenses of age, Honoria is the complex story of the education of two young girls who have started moving slowly into womanhood. In the “perfect inverted world” of adults, one of constant play, leisure and inebriation, it’s the children who most acutely perceive the pervasive unhappiness bubbling beneath the surface gaiety.

And all along the way this April, there’s music…
byob and a twenty for the band!
Call ahead if you want to reserve a seat!

You’ve already missed six brilliant events in the first six days of April… author Syed Afzal Haider…poets Michael Koch and Francisco Orrego…the David Janeway Trio…the San Francisco Syncopators…Marina Crouse and Her Trio…the Ryan Ancheta UCB/SFCM combo and jam session. All were packed into the month’s first week. You can catch up on them by visiting our YouTube channel, where they await you…

There’s so much more to come before the month is done! 18 more events in April by our count…

find our calendar at this link.