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!
jazz club: Saturday, Oct. 4th – 8-11 pm
The Smith Dobson Quartet
with Ben Goldberg
Clarinetist Ben Goldberg has been playing at the top echelon of American progressive jazz for a couple of decades and has recorded prolifically, including a recent session with tenor sax player Smith Dobson, the leader of our 1st Saturday “jazz club” sessions.  Drummer Hamir Atwell and bassist Eric Markowitz, two key and wonderfully creative players on…
First Fridays jazz in the bookshop!
Don Prell’s Seabop Ensemble
5:30 to 8:00 pm
The first Friday of every month, it’s always Don Prell’s Seabop Ensemble — a fixture in San Francisco’s longest running neighborhood jazz party! Don has had a six decade love affair with the string bass and jazz, beginning back in the 1950s. That’s when he first made his mark as a mainstay of the Bud Shank…
Sunday, September 28th – 4:30-6:30 pm
El Guajiro! Johnny Escobedo
Cuban son, boleros y guajiras from a three-piece ensemble led by singer and guitarist Johnny Escobedo, with Norman Downing, percussion and vocals; Roberto Razon, tres cubano and vocals! The sounds of Havana and the Cuban countryside! Read more on El Guajiro site: Â click here!
Sunday, September 28th – 2:30 p.m.
Walker Talks!
Eriugena’s theology of the logos
Walker Brents IIIÂ weaves a fascinating web of insight, association, speculation and delight the last Sunday of every month, following his muse where it takes him on topics divers — from epic literature to mythological tales to the enigmas of poetry and the profundities of philosophy and religion. Today at 2:30, join his many devotees to…
Saturday, Sept. 27th – 8-11 p.m.
The Michael Parsons Quintet
Farewell concert
& live recording session!
Michael is leaving for Paris, drawn by love, and vowing to return, in 2016, married, we sincerely hope, to the lovely Siham! Â He’s unquestionably the best young bebop piano player on the local scene, having climbed quickly to that level over the past decade since arriving here from the Central Valley town of Lodi. Â There,…
The CCSF Struggle: A report from the trenches
A report on a recent ACCJC/Herrera conference– A friend of Bird & Beckett writes: “​If I had known it would be this interesting, I would have urged more to attend. Traffic was a problem in getting there. But inside the courtroom, the half-hour case management conference was rewarding. It started with the usual, the People…
Tuesday, Sept. 23rd – 7:00 pm
Poets Maria Mazziotti Gillan
and Jan Beatty
Maria Mazziotti Gillan, in California from her home back east for the Petaluma Poetry Walk, recently published a new volume of poems called The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets.  She is a recipient of the 2014 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs), the 2011 Barnes…
Sunday, Sept. 21st – 4:30-6:30 pm
The Forest and the Zoo:
A Tribute to Steve Lacy
feat. poet Clark Coolidge, et al.
As part of a series of Bay Area tributes to the late soprano sax specialist and innovator, Steve Lacy, we’ll present an exciting two set concert offering aspects of Lacy’s work from widely-separated periods of his career: Tips, a cycle of songs he wrote based on Georges Braque aphorisms; and a quartet set inspired by his 1966 ESP-Disk free…
Sunday, Sept. 21 – 2 pm
Poets Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet
+ Robert Thomas
Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s The Greenhouse, published this month by Bull City Press, won the 2014 Frost Place Chapbook Contest.  Judge David Baker praised The Greenhouse “for its interplay of restlessness and patience, its mapping of an interiority both shared and dearly personal, and its lyric and maternal primacy. Primacy is the circumstance, yet doubleness is the story, the double birth…
Friday, September 19th
Art Pepper Tribute
A Live Jazz & Book Event
Laurie Pepper in person!
music 5:30 to 8:00;
Laurie’s reading at 8:30
Art Pepper was without question one of the most sublimely beautiful alto sax players who ever graced the jazz scene, in his music and visage both… The dozen records that bear his name as leader are testament to his incredible art, and his autobiography, Straight Life —Â a collaboration with his wife Laurie Pepper — is…