Celebrating the first two seasons of titles from the independent publisher, Magra Books (magrabooks.com). Gillian Conoley will read from her just published chapbook, Preparing One’s Consciousness for the Avatar, along with Martha Ronk reading from her 2016 title, Unfamiliar Familiar; Art Beck from his new translation, Martial, Epigrams; Dennis Phillips from his Desert Sequence chapbook;…

Henry Hung, trumpet Scott Foster, guitar Eric Markowitz, bass Omar Aran, drums The Scott Foster Quartet plays the music of Lee Morgan!  Lee Morgan was one of the top jazz trumpet stars of the late 1950s and 1960s, recording prolifically on Blue Note and other labels –featured on John Coltrane’s “Blue Trane” (1957) and Art…

For a Bob Ernst bio, visit https://www.altertheater.org/about2 towards/away… The focus intensifies as the periphery disperses. Our hero is a stranger in a strange land. He finds himself running for his life in an alien landscape being pursued by something or someone he can’t quite make out. “Am I running towards, or am I running away…

In 1996, anthropologist Mike Youngblood purchased a second-hand motorcycle in India and spent nearly three years following a massive rural political movement called the Shetkari Sanghatana, spread out across the 120,000 square miles of India’s Maharashtra State.  In his travels, he experienced the movement side-by-side with increasingly rich capitalist farmers, with increasingly poor peasants and rural…

Second Mondays, starting Monday, September 11th, Bird & Beckett will be hosting a jam session for the incoming class of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s brand new jazz BMUS (Bachelor of Music) degree program. The SFCM’s program is called “Roots, Jazz & American Music” and its first group of thirteen young students, drawn from…

Pianist Grant Levin leads duo, trio and quartet dates on the 2nd, 3rd & 4th Sundays of each month, respectively. This sequence will go down in the annals of San Francisco jazz history. Tonight, a duo! Bassist Charles Thomas is Grant’s duo partner this evening.  

Featuring some of the San Francisco region’s finest veteran bluegrass musicians, the Thundering Heard performs traditional bluegrass music, exceptionally well. Multi-instrumentalist and singer Victor Skidanenko, hailing from San Jose, is known as one of the finest banjo players on the West Coast and gives a deep traditional dimension to the band. Singing heartfelt leads and…

A bare-bones theatrical afternoon at Bird & Beckett! Jeff DeMark headlines the program with his trademark mojo bunkum trance dance of mystery and poetic balderdash. Jeff has written and widely performed five theatrical monologues, two of which are available on DVD. He has performed his work at Bird and Beckett three times over the years….

  The Jazz Philanthropists Union presents… Harvey Wainapel, reeds John Wiitala, bass Bryan Bowman, drums