653 Chenery Street
in San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood
1-415-586-3733
[email protected]
Open to walk-in trade and browsing
Tuesday to Sunday
noon to six
Live Streams every weekend!
Refresh your browser to catch a show in progress!
Visit our Facebook page or YouTube channel!
But nothing beats being in the room with the music & the musicians!
Saki Minamimoto, vocal. Ian Carey, trumpet. Beth Schenck, sax. Matt Wrobel, guitar. Lisa Mezzacappa, bass. Jon Arkin, drums. $30 cover charge; byob. Reservations, call 415-586-3733. Saki Minamimoto is a jazz vocalist, singer-songwriter and improviser born and raised in Japan. She will be performing “Songs From My Attic” with her group, presenting new music and music reminiscent of her adolescence that’s been stored in her mind for a long time, waiting for this moment to be renewed. In two hours tonight, Saki will explore original music, nostalgic pop songs by The Carpenters and Gilbert O’Sullivan, and compositions by Kenny Wheeler, Carla Bley, Lenny Tristano and Leonard Bernstein, with her unique sonic palette and ethereal soundscapes. More insight here from trumpeter Ian Carey, including a podcast interview with Saki. Saki’s Bandcamp page: https://sakiminamimotoponchoponcho.bandcamp.com/music
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Lynne Maes, vocals and guitar. Hank Maninger, vocals and lead guitar. Joe Goldmark, pedal steel guitar. Tim Wagar, bass. Leor Beary, drums. $25 cover charge, byob. Reservations, call the shop at 415-586-3733. Classic country duets, honky tonk and rockabilly from two sweethearts who got hitched years ago, and assembled a fantastic band to tell their story and sing the songs they love. Hank has a long history on the twang circuit in these parts and far afield, including his key role in Chris Gaffney’s Hacienda Brothers after coming up through Bonnie Hayes’ Wild Combo, Chuck Prophet’s outfit and the Aqua Velvets, coming into his own with his trio, the Juke Box Charlies, and his long run at the heart of The Seducers, a Bird & Beckett and Riptide staple until that band’s amicable divorce not so long ago. Along the way, Hank met, romanced and married the sharp witted…
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Thursday the 8th at 7:30pm, a Hindustani recital featuring sarodist Souryadeep Bhattacharya and tabla maestro Ferhan Qureshi. Ferhan has been kind enough to curate a wonderful series of Hindustani and Carnatic concerts at Bird & Beckett, roughly once a month for the past many months, with no end date in mind. Souryadeep is a talent vast as the sea. Friday, the jazz is back again with two shows, the first at 6pm and the second at 8:30pm, each with a $20 cover charge (cash, please, as always, and as for all of our shows, byob). Feel free to call the shop at 415-586-3733 to reserve. Pay at the door when you arrive. The May 9th 6pm show will feature the marvelous pianist and raconteur Eric Shifrin, playing the music of Jelly Roll Morton, the man who — he claims — invented jazz! That’s not that far from the truth, and…
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A reunion poetry reading for Five On the Western Edge, the Momo’s Press 1976 volume of five poets responding to radical politics, including the rise of the women’s movement challenging gender roles. Reading from the original book and new work. Free. Donations welcome. Byob. To reserve a seat, call the shop at 415-586-3733. Live streamed on Bird & Beckett’s YouTube channel and Facebook page. You can get there by visting the homepage of the bookshop’s website at https://www.birdbeckett.com. Click on the videoscreen there, but if the reading hasn’t started yet, you’ll need to refresh your browser until it does start.
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coming up… …..5/15 at 7:30pm (livestream). no charge, but donations help! Walker Brents on Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. …..5/16 at 6pm, $20: The Scott Foster Combo w/Jim Peterson, Dan Seamans, Tom Hassett. …..5/16 at 8:30pm, $20: The Brian Andres Quartet w/Tony Peebles, Erick Peralta, Aaron Germain. …..5/17 at 7:30pm, $20: Thu Ho sings for Helen Merrill w/Noel Jewkes, Anne Sajdera, Aaron Germain, Joe Kelner. …..5/18 at 5pm, $20: The Vince Lateano Trio w/Ben Stolorow, Peter Barshay. …..5/20 at 5pm, free: The Art of Remembering: Writers from the Community Living Campaign. …..5/22 at 7:30pm, donations appreciated: Five on the Western Edge, a reading by Beau Beausoleil, Steve Brooks, Larry Felsen, Hilton Obenzinger, Stephen Vincent revisiting the 1976 Momo’s Press anthology. …..5/23 at 6pm, $20: The 230 Jones Street Band w/Charlie McCarthy, Sam Cady, Chuck Bennett & Tony Johnson. …..5/23 at 8:30pm, $20: Carnaval Descarga with Annette A. Aguilar’s Bean on the…
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Here at Bird & Beckett Books, we’ve always relied on the kindness of neighbors and strangers to make it all work; and we’ve always found that strangers don’t stay strangers long! Your tax-deductible donations to our 501(c)3 nonprofit, the Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project, FEIN 261906810, are the secret sauce. Book sales and cover charges at the shows are crucial, but only go so far to fill the cornucopia of culture that you’ll find here at Bird & Beckett! You can donate through our website using PayPal. Or if you prefer, you can drop off or mail us a check made out to the “Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project” — write “tax-deductible donation” in the memo line. Cash is fine if you prefer. You can also donate on a recurring, monthly basis through PayPal — which is quite a wonderful way to support us. Bright moments ahead, thanks…
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The posts that follow show you what’s come and gone. Search the videos on our youtube channel or facebook page to find evidence of what you remember, or what you missed! Then, make sure you catch the next thing that catches your fancy. The live streams are great, but live music in a room with folks you know or ought to get to know, that’s irreplaceable…
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Aaron Bennett, tenor saxophone Mark Clifford, vibraphone Brett Carson, keyboard Lisa Mezzacappa, acoustic bass Jordan Glenn, drums $25 cover charge (cash or venmo, please) byob for a reservation, call 415-586-3733 Berkeley bassist and composer Lisa Mezzacappa launches a yearlong residency at Bird & Beckett, to revisit and refresh older repertoire and compose a new set of music for the the latest incarnation of her stellar improvising ensemble. Mezzacappa’s previous works for this group have drawn inspiration from Dashiell Hammett and Paul Auster’s lean noir crime novels and Italo Calvino’s hilarious and poignant Cosmicomics stories. Now she’s exploring the concept of worldbuilding—inspired by teenage Dungeons & Dragons sessions with her metalhead friends, and her fascination with the speculative fiction of Ursula Le Guin, Haruki Murakami and David Mitchell— as a way to envision new kinds of musical interaction, storytelling, structure and play. At the bookstore, she enjoys reading excerpts from…
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Your Bird & Beckett proprietor well remembers the day that piano professor Eric Shifrin laid a cd on me after one of his lovely monthly dates in the bookshop (remember those burned cds that proliferated for the better part of a quarter century?). I put in the shop’s 5-cd changer and forgot about it until one day I was going about my business, thinking “who’s that wonderful piano player coming out of the house sound system” or thoughts to that effect… solo pianistics that seemed so reminiscent of all the classic piano professors from the ragtime, early New Orleans, stride and boogie woogie periods. I pulled it out and it had Eric’s name on it and a date, and those magic two words “New Orleans” — I asked him about it next time I he came in to the shop to play, and he explained he’d been down to that…
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From 8-10pm, Mean to Me, a quintet steeped in classic tunes of the 1940s and ’50s, takes the stage. Judy Butterfield handles the vocals, with Ben Slater on saxophone and piano, Dave Schaff on trumpet, Sam Heminger on bass and Cairo McCockran on drums. A wonderful band. From 5 to 7pm, six young musicians — students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and University of California at Berkeley — field a jazz ensemble assembled by the young Vietnamese guitarist Tri Pham. With Tri are Ryan Ancheta, trumpet (UC Berkeley); Trent Horio, tenor sax (SFCM); Sean Walters McDonald, bass (SFCM); EJ Brannan, drums (UC Berkeley); and Nhi Do, vocals. Donations appreciated! $25 cover for the late show; byob.
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A reading in turbulent times, with Palestine in mind and heart. Bring your poems. Michael Koch and Jerry Ferraz host. Deema K. Shehabi is a Palestinian-American poet, writer, and editor. She’s the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon and co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, for which she received a Northern California Book Award. She’s also co-author of Diaspo/Renga (republished as Water to Water in Fall 2025) with Marilyn Hacker and winner of the Nazim Hikmet poetry competition in 2018. Deema’s work has also appeared in Academy of American Poets, Prairie Schooner, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry London, Kenyon Review,The Massachusetts Review, and in anthologies including Ask the Night for a Dream: New Palestinian Writing from the Diaspora. Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her collection of 40 palindromic sonnets, titled This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, is forthcoming from Penguin Poets in…
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Friday, May 2nd – two concerts: at 6pm, it’s a trio led by trumpeter Mike Olmos with Jed Holtman, bass, and Andre Sumelius, drums. Mike Olmos is back at 8:30 in saxophonist James Mahone’s quartet with Sam Bevan, bass, and Michael Mitchell, drums. A phenomenal night of small combo jazz. Twenty bucks cash for either show, or catch both for $35. Byob, as always, and a reservation is always a good idea — call the shop at 415-586-3733. Saturday, May 3rd at 7:30pm, trumpeter Erik Jekabson brings a quartet with Matt Renzi on saxophone, Dexter Williams on bass and Brian Fishler, drums. $20 cover, cash please! An interesting sequence of three dates in two days without a piano or guitar in sight. Chordless and bursting with musical intricacy! The two quartet dates this weekend are supported with a subsidy from Jazz in the Neighborhood, a 501(c)3 that puts your support…
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Wednesday, April 30th at 7:30pm, 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. That’s young Honoria at the far right, with her siblings and her mother, Sara Murphy, who, together which her husband Gerald Murphy, were at the center of a constellation of gadflies flitting about them and their guests at the Murphys’ Cap d’Antibes villa — guests that included 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. It’s the summer of 1929, when Ida, a young, sheltered and unsophisticated girl from New York, is sent by her father to stay with Honoria and her parents, the Murphys, at their villa…
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Jazz is the sound of surprise. Risk an hour of your life! Byob and a twenty for the trio!
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Hal Richards, winds, reeds & arrangements. Henry Hung, trumpet. Rumi Abe, piano. Ron Belcher, bass. Akira Tana, drums. $25 cover charge, cash please! $1.50 surcharge on credit/debit. Please pay at the door, and byob. For a reservation, call the shop at 415-586-3733. Hal Richards is a musician of many horns. When he first strolled into Bird & Beckett in the early aughts for a gig with our Friday happy hour band, the one that started all this jazz for us back in 2002, he made it a point of pride that he carried in all his horns — numbering seven, if we remember correctly — in a single entrance. These days, he still makes it a single entrance for the most part, but he picks and chooses which horns and how many of them to lug. Sometimes as few as five or six! Still, it’s not the number of horns…
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SUPPORT BIRD & BECKETT - DONATE TODAY!
Your donation to the Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project helps us pay for a multitude of operating expenses necessary to present, promote and preserve local music, poetry, and more.
Help us keep the arts alive and thriving!
The Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project was created in 2007 "to present, document and archive the creative work of significant living writers and musicians in the San Francisco Bay Area, for a neighborhood audience and future generations," continuing the work we began when the store was established in 1999.
We continue to present a full slate of programming of live music and poetry readings, and produce a literary journal and poetry chapbooks, and we seek and welcome your continued financial support by way of donations.
Click on "donate" in the navigation bar above. Better yet, make a check out to the “Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project” and drop it off or mail it to:
Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project
653 Chenery Street
San Francisco, CA 94131
Call us at (415) 586-3733 to find out how else you might lend your support.
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We're immensely appreciative of Jazz in the Neighborhood for having stepped in as our temporary fiscal sponsor for a few months, while we straightened out some paperwork to get nonprofit status restored to the BBCLP. We're happy to say that's been done, and all past, present, and future donations made directly to the BBCLP are fully tax-deductible!
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The Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project
Our events are put on under the umbrella of the Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project (the "BBCLP"). That's how we fund our ambitious schedule of 300 or so concerts and literary events every year.
The BBCLP is a [Read More ]
The Independent Musicians Alliance
Gigging musicians! You have nothing to lose but your lack of a collective voice to achieve fair wages for your work!
The IMA can be a conduit for you, if you join in to make it work.
https://www.independentmusiciansalliance.org/
Read more here - Andy Gilbert's Feb 25 article about the IMA from KQED's site
