Put your holiday season in high gear with a few Parlor Tricks!!!

Sunday, December 9th – 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

Bird & Beckett’s weekly which way west? Sunday concert series. Never a cover charge, but your generous donations help us pay the musicians! All ages welcome.

Picture a snowy New York Sunday morning in 1904, Christmas coming on.  As the electric streetlights wink off, Reverend Edward Martin Waller makes his way from home to church, and the weary and slap-happy denizens of the city’s syncopated Saturday night frenzy trail home to their beds.

The brand new subway system, now in operation for all of six weeks, slumbers fitfully beneath the city streets. Steam power — that formerly modern lurch into an entirely new pace of life — has given way in turn to a new magic as tentacles of vast electrical distribution systems riddle the city, powering the nickelodeons and the electric streetcar lines.

Syncopation has become the new way of experiencing rhythm, speed, stomp and swerve, driving us all into new deliriums of pleasure and excitement.  Liquor is still legal and the party never stops!

The good Reverend Waller has left the newborn Thomas Wright Waller, soon to be dubbed “Fats”, suckling happily at his mother’s breast… and for the secretaries and the clerks, the warehouse workers and factory mechanics, all that’s needed is a good day’s sleep.  Come Sunday night, the bars and clubs will spring right back to syncopated life, the bubbly will start to flow again… and it’ll be time for a few new Parlor Tricks!

Parlor Tricks is:  Eddie Scher, National resonator guitar; Melina Selverston, sultry vocals; Jeff Bruner, contrabass and Jasen Mars, tympani — a self-styled “industrial ragtime” band, doing for syncopation what Led Zepplin did for the theremin and what Lady Gaga did for bubbles!

Click here for a Parlor Tricks rave-up on “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home”

Shotwell opens the festivities, with the promise to take you back to those times when your biggest cares were winning your sweetheart’s love, surviving a long winter and getting your dang mule to cross those train tracks.  Saddle up, grab your flask and hunker down for alt-country with a Mission District edge.

Shotwell plays the sound of the urban west — tunes of longing and heartache woven together by sweet harmonies, wailing fiddle and gritty picking, with their own twist on work by artists from Whiskeytown and Linda Ronstadt to Johnny Cash.

Julian Gross on lead guitar and mandolin, Ben Beach on vocals and rhythm guitar, Geoff Boushey on fiddle, and Kim Thuy Seelinger and Leslie Bailey on vocal harmonies