Here’s a little backstory, to get us to where we now stand…
in re: the Fridays, anyway…

Read on! And thanks for being part of the Bird & Beckett story
in the present day.

/s/Eric Whittington, proprietor, since 1999

 

Once upon a time, in the late spring of 1999, Bird & Beckett opened its doors down on Diamond Street where Manzoni now serves exquisite Northern Italian cuisine to the ravenous epicures who’ve found their way to Glen Park.

We took on the nicely appointed 1,000 square foot space from the four-year-old Glen Park Books, and paid our rent to Manhal Jweinat, still to this day the crepemaster behind the counter of his kitty-corner coffee house, Higher Grounds, which he opens in the early morning before jamming across the street to handle his love child, Manzoni through the dinner hours. Amazing fella, and still a good friend, that Manhal!

Within a few months of opening Bird & Beckett, we were almost accidentally presenting the occasional live jazz combo. I don’t remember the date of the very first one, but vividly remember the trio that played it…

A customer who let on he was a musician and told me his name was John Clark (brother of the late, great and storied poet Tom Clark– that caught my attention!) was flipping through the jazz records at the front of the shop one day and we got to talking. Next thing you know, we’d scheduled a trio with John on bass, the keyboard player Lee Bloom (this was before we got our first shop piano, long before there was a shop cat…) and, on drums, none other than the legendary Vince Lateano… We pushed some rolling bookcases aside one weekend afternoon and set up 12 chairs and had a fine time.

From the start in 1999, whenever we could save a few dimes from book sales to pay at least a token guarantee to the players, we presented the occasional combo. The first was a student trio helmed by Lee Bloom’s piano student Jon Anderson with his buddy Andrew Kelsey.

A few months later, Eric Shifrin, a delightful presence on the local jazz scene since he hit town in 1990, and a friend of the Destination Bakery counter gal Deb (who had managed Enrico’s in North Beach in her not-so-distant past), came to check out the store and soon returned to play a one-off Sunday trio date for us. Nowadays, you’ll hear Eric with his “In Crowd” combo at Bird & Beckett on the 2nd Friday of each month.

But to return to our story… after a year or so like that, Mary Goode found her way to the shop. A hummingbird of a woman and a Joost Street Sunnyside resident / peripatetic public nurse / angel of mercy who many will fondly remember, Mary would often drop in on the great radical rabble rousing SEIU member/Kaiser intake worker Blanche Bebb for a few pops at Glen Park Station. Blanche was our literary angel from the beginning, lived just around the corner from the shop with one of her three lovely daughters and her lovely granddaughter, was an adoring devotee of the great Russian and Czech writers in particular; learned Russian in order to read Pushkin in his own language; collected H.L. Mencken, Frederic Morton and others; railed against the idiots and miscreants. We miss her every day.

But to return to our story (again)… Mary Goode, pronounced “Goodie,” sister of the parish priest at St. Finn Barr out on Edna Street and recently minted widow of legendary local drummer Johnny Markham, was wild about the jazz she heard emanating from Blanche Bebb’s favorite bookshop. And one fine day, she sent our way the bearded, grey haired Chuck Peterson, a journeyman tenor & bari saxophonist and flutist who lived up on Martha Street just off Congo, in a house he shared with his wife, Mary Cabot. Chuck had left the pit orchestras of San Francisco’s theater district and his playing time had dwindled to a monthly engagement in a big band led by Congo Street resident Rudy Salvini, a legendary fella himself, out at the Lake Merced boathouse. The two Marys (Goode and Cabot) had convinced Chuck that Bird & Beckett might be convinced to institute a steady weekly jazz policy, and they were right.

Chuck proposed to me that if I’d give him a weekly gig paying what I was able, he’d bring good musicians and make sure they got paid adequately. We came to an agreement on that score, and the next thing we knew, it was October 2002 and we had begun a weekly jazz happy hour on Fridays that ran from 4:30 to 7pm. “Jazz in the bookshop” we began to call it… so dubbed by trumpeter Eddie Figueroa, who never sat in with the band that we can remember but liked to come to listen to his old buddies play.

A cavalcade of veteran jazz players cycled through Chuck’s trio, with bassist Don Prell a steady presence on that trio, practically a labor contractor for the date by virtue of his long- and still-running Bay View Boat Club steady gig that dozens of good players cycled through. Guitarist Scott Foster, a relative youngster, was on the dates more often than not, one of the players learning the local jazz gigging ropes from the veterans that played with Don. Scott continues to this day as an anchor of our bookings, bringing in a combo on the third Friday of each month, always great, always different; he’s been teacher and mentor to countless young players that make waves on the local jazz scene these past few decades.

Along the way, we added a piano and also added a monthly Sunday afternoon gig for the wonderful singer Dorothy Lefkovits and her musical partner Henry Irvin, a guitarist with a long history in jazz as sideman, bandleader and arranger. If I’m not mistaken, bassist Mark Williams, Hesh, worked with them on some dates, though as a Diamond Heights neighbor he often dropped in, and for years Hesh has played here dozens and dozens of times. The alto genius Bishop Norman Williams and the lovely pianist B.J. Papa were often on the date with Dorothy and Henry, and their steady drummer was Jimmy Ryan, who soon joined up with Chuck’s trio to make the trio a quartet. Henry and then Jimmy both passed away quite a few years back, and Dorothy lives back east near her daughter, still singing from time to time, from what we hear

We went through quite a few pianos over the years, each one a bit worse than the last, until we settled on one that Joshua Brody gave us (the one in the photos below), which stood us in good stead up to the time that Steve Shapiro, a Chenery Street neighbor and at that time the director of the San Francisco Community Music Center, convinced Piedmont Piano to loan us a P22 studio upright. A few years later, we threw a day-long fundraiser to buy one of our own, and it still does the job well and heroically.

As the years rolled along, Chuck expanded the quartet to a quintet with the addition of saxophonist/arranger Bill Perkins (not to be confused with the L.A. Bill Perkins, though every bit as talented a musician). When Bill eventually needed to retire, Howard Dudune, Chuck’s old mentor and a wonderful tenor sax and clarinet player, took his place. After many years of Fridays, sometime after we left Diamond Street and moved the store up onto Chenery where it remains, the quintet broke into four individual combos, a quintet and three quartets, and we settled into a weekly rotation of bands, each led by core members of the Chuck Peterson Quartet that dated back to 2002. The unbroken string of Friday shows continued, the famous pandemic notwithstanding, up until a couple of blips in the 2024 holiday season. And they continue, to this day.

The move from 2788 Diamond Street to 653 Chenery Street happened in August 2008, with Chuck’s long-time quintet playing in the old shop one Friday night and in the new shop the next. In between, the neighbors turned out and we got the store’s entire inventory of books moved up the street midweek in a light rain. It happened to be the day of a party being thrown mid-block that afternoon on Chenery Street at a restaurant that’s now gone, Chenery Park. The party was being thrown by the poet and activist Janice Mirikitani (Poet Laureate of San Francisco, 2000-2002) for her husband, the Rev. Cecil Williams, pastor of Glide Memorial Church, on the verge of his 81st birthday. The Glide Chorus was on hand to sing for Rev. Williams and his friends.

It’s said that Maya Angelou and Hilary Clinton were at that party; Hilary had just suspended her campaign for the presidency, with Barack Obama gaining the nomination and the office. Hilary’s Secret Service detail was still in place and a bit watchful as we trundled the books up the street. It was a good day. Those were golden years in many ways; flawed in many ways, but golden in ways we only now can really appreciate.

As we mentioned, the quintet broke up into four individual combos, a quintet and three quartets, sometime after we moved up to Chenery Street, and we settled into a weekly rotation of bands, each led by a core member of the 2002 Chuck Peterson Quartet. Jimmy called his combo the Bird & Beckett Bebop Band, often featuring the fiercely multi-talented bebopper and postbop composer Don Alberts on piano, bassists Bishu Chatterjee, John Wiitala, and Charles Thomas, alto player Pete Yellin when he relocated here from New York, and others. Don’s band was Seabop, already established at the Bay View Boat Club. So many great players came to us from Seabop, including Chuck and Scott, but also saxophonists Jerry Logas and Jim Grantham, guitarists Duncan James and Ray Scott, and a whole slew of kids first schooled by Bishop Norman Williams on Grant Street in North Beach at the Gathering Caffe, including Jimmy’s son Joel Ryan, plus the younger-still Haight Street Club Deluxe, now mid-career players that include Adam Shulman, Michael Parsons, Smith Dobson, Danny Brown, Ulf Bjorkbom. The third quartet was co-led by Chuck and Don, with Scott on guitar, and the drummer Ron Marabuto. Eventually, at our staff photographer’s urging, Scott took leadership of that third quartet and leads the third Fridays date to this day, with a revolving roster of terrific colleagues that he’s worked with over his thirty-plus years in the jazz world.

Chuck kept the quintet format that he perfected with Bill Perkins, dubbing it the 230 Jones Street, Local 6, Literary Jazz Band, with Howard Dudune on tenor and clarinet, Glen Deardorff on guitar, Dean Reilly on bass and Tony Johnson on drums. When Chuck finally retired and moved north, Ray Loeckle took his place alongside Howie, and when Howie suddenly passed, tenor and bari saxophonist / flutist Jerry Logas took the chair next to Ray. Ray, too, eventually retired from the band and Dean passed, and Tony Johnson and Glen kept the 230 Jones tradition of veteran players going, with bassist Al Obidinski and pianist Si Perkoff both important elements of a band that continues to evolve.

Glen has retired, but Tony still helms the 230 Jones Street Band, the legacy band of Chuck Peterson. It’s a quartet now, with Charlie McCarthy on tenor and flute, Sam Cady on piano, Chuck Bennett on bass and Tony Johnson on drums, playing every other 4th Friday at Bird & Beckett, alternating with the Tony Johnson Quartet quartet featuring mid-career giants of San Francisco jazz — saxophonist Bob Kenmotsu, pianist Keith Saunders and bassist Eric Markowitz.

And the bop goes on…