Sunday, August 19th – 4:30 to 6:30 pm

Pasha Band

(Husain Resan Ensemble)

Pan-Arabic music

We’re fortunate once again to have some of the Bay Area’s fine middle eastern musicians grace the Bird & Beckett stage this Sunday in our “which way west?” weekly concert series.  Last December, you may have been lucky enough to hear the Ayjal Ensemble perform here (view a video of that performance at this link!); the Pasha Band includes three members of that ensemble:  Husain Dixon Resan is an oud and violin player, vocalist and composer who hails from Iraq.  He studied oud beginning at age 14 in Bayt al-Fann in Baghdad, and joined its music ensemble at age 16.  Coming to the U.S., he studied violin at City College, and has been a key component of the middle eastern music scene here in San Francisco for many years.  Joining Husain in the Pasha Band is violinist Younes Al-Maqboul, who has set high standards for the violinists here since arriving from Morocco a couple of years ago, and Amina Goodyear, a renowned figure locally for her work as a dancer and teacher, often performing on percussion with the region’s best middle eastern musicians.  Her blog, Ba Olek Eh (tell you what) is a goldmine of insight into the day-to-day activities of dozens of musicians and dancers who comprise the local Arabic music community.  Linda Grondahl, a dancer and percussionist, will also join the ensemble for this Sunday’s performance.

 

Sunday, August 19, 2:30 pm

Droll Poets: Marvin R. Hiemstra
& Stephen Kopel

Each of these poets works the language for its maximum potential to entertain & delight.  Be here or be squeere…

Marvin R. Hiemstra is an award-winning poet, humorist, founding Editor-in-Chief of the Bay Area Poets Seasonal Review, critic and entertainer, who publishes and performs everywhere.  Roger Huet of the Montreal Gazette, called Marvin’s new collection Poet Wrangler: droll poems, “nothing less than a delicious philosophy of poetry and, in the process, a radiant philosophy of life.”

Steven Kopel, San Francisco’s “pedaling poet,” yearns to provision your Glen Park outing with a delectable spread in Picnic Poetry, hot off the press and not lacking in the mayonnaise.    A San Francisco treat.  Sez Stephen, he’ll “spread a picnic of particularities which will, hopefully, cause smiles, nay, even chuckles to fill the bookstore…even shelved spines have been known to wiggle with delight hearing poet Kopel’s witty wordplay.”

 

Author Joe Pachinko

reads from
Geek City Apocalypso

Sunday (8/12) at 2:30 pm

By turns poetic, blunt, and hallucinatory, Geek City Apocalypso is a tragi-comic elegy to lost love set in the grungy underbelly of turn of the millenium San Francisco.

A roller coaster meditation on life, love, and existence that takes you from Tenderloin residence hotels to corporate cubicle farms and back.

Joe’s previous novel, Swamp, keeps company on the bookshelves with his poetry volumes Stumpfucker Cavalcade and The Urinals of Hell and his comic The Incredibly Stoopit Adventures of Granpa Stuped.

Bright Side Band

traditional Americana
acoustic trio

Sunday (8/12)
from 4:30-6:30 pm

Described as “Bert Jansch meets Gillian Welch meets Lucia Micarelli” the Bright Side Band offers a folk-blues style blended with Americana, British folk, and Celtic influences into an original acoustic sound.  

A video of the group playing a medley of “Buttermilk Hill” (Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier) and “Pretty Girl Milking a Cow” can be viewed at this link