BIRD & BECKETT CULTURAL LEGACY PROJECT
Spend your spooky Halloween at Bird & Beckett! $20 cover charge per show / byob Eric & the In Crowd get Creepy at 6pm. Eric Shifrin, piano Paul Mehling, guitar Jim Kerwin, bass Winston Tong with Dreambounders (LX Rudis & Andre Custodio) plus M 5tevens at 8:30pm.
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10/30, 7:30pm – Del Seymour in conversation with Alison Owings, author of Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour’s Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness in San Francisco. _____ And on Halloween: Blues for Dracula! Eric & the In Crowd Get Creepy – 6-8pm Winston Tong with Dreambounders LX Rudis & Andre Custodio and guest M 5tevens – 8:30-10:30pm _____ Saturday November 1st, 7:30 Martin Luther McCoy Fills Your Soul Full! _____ November 16th The Poetry of Jazz: Allan Harris with The Sylvia Cuenca Trio Check the events calendar linked from the navigation bar for details!
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In Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour’s journey from living in the streets to fighting homelessness in San Francisco, journalist Alison Owings slips behind the cold statistics and sensationalism surrounding San Francisco’s Tenderloin to reveal a harrowing and life-affirming account of Del Seymour–whose addiction led him into eighteen years of homelessness, pimping and drug dealing. Once sober, he started Tenderloin Walking Tours and later Code Tenderloin, an organization teaching homeless, recovering addicts, sex workers, dealers, ex-felons and other marginalized people how to get and keep a job. Owings traces Del’s story and those in his orbit: from his daughters, sobriety buddy and ex-girlfriend, to a police captain and a psychiatric social worker, housing activists and corporate philanthropists, and Del’s Code Tenderloin students. In the Tenderloin, in a city known for its beauty and currently infamous for its divide between haves and have-nots, Owings highlights how Del gives back to people struggling…
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Anne Whiteside’s The Moon in Splinters: Searching for Maurice Pertschuk, British Secret Agent in the French Resistance, is a moving and meticulously researched account that brings to light the extraordinary life and tragic death of British Special Operations Executive (SOE) Lieutenant Maurice Pertschuk. On a moonless night in 1942, Pertschuk, a handsome and brilliant 20-year-old officer, rowed ashore on the Côte d’Azur to support the French Resistance. Just three years later, he was executed at Buchenwald concentration camp—only thirteen days before its liberation. Within the camp, Maurice scribbled poems on scraps of paper, later published in 1946 as Leaves of Buchenwald. For decades, silence shrouded his story. Only after the death of her mother did Maurice’s niece, Anne Whiteside, begin to search for the truth. In The Moon in Splinters, she retraces his footsteps through wartime France, uncovers new archival evidence, and speaks with survivors’ families. What emerges is a…
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Alison Luterman reads from her new volume of poetry, Hard Listening (Wildhouse Publishing, 2025), and is joined in conversation about her work by Leslie Absher. Hard Listening focuses on women’s voices raised up in song, poetry, and activism. Spiritual teacher and writer Mirabai Starr has said, “Alison Luterman is one of my favorite poetic voices. The poems in this collection are luminous.” During the pandemic, Alison started taking voice lessons in order to sing with her musician husband. She did not start out with a firm grasp of pitch or a great sense of rhythm, but had a lot of enthusiasm, a wonderful teacher, and a willingness to work hard. Learning to “speak music”—her husband’s primary language—was the key that opened them up to an unexpected depth of intimacy. The process of learning to sing reminded her of all the singers she had idolized from a young age. She began…
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Brazilian choro music from San Francisco. $20/byob. Students $10. Grupo Falso Baiano. Catia Machado, vocals. Zack Pitt-Smith, reeds and cavaquinho. Brian Moran, guitar. Ami Molinelli. percussion. with special guest Kerry Politzer, piano. .
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Friday, October 24th – 8:30pm
LOBE: was that on purpose?
release party & concert
for their debut album
LOBE, a sextet with Stanford roots, now in the diaspora, come together and come to Bird & Beckett to kick off their 10-day, 5-stop California tour in support of their debut album “was that on purpose?” — release date October 21, 2025. Daiki Nakajima, flute/bass. Ethan Buck, alto sax/bass. Sam Silverstein, violin. Nolan Miranda, piano/synth. Mark Rau, guitar/bass. Michael Hayes, drums. Anav Sood, synth/piano.
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Two writers long committed to the struggle and to poetry roll out new work for you.
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A live stream found on the Bird & Beckett YouTube channel and Facebook page. Donations appreciated. Walker Brents III has been giving a monthly talk at Bird & Beckett on a diversity of topics in poetry, philosophy and culture since 1999. This month, Walker considers the poet Gary Snyder, and gives us this to ponder: “The language art of Gary Snyder. Such a continuous and consistent manifestation of an inspired consciousness, given to us over the course of a long life. We are richer for it, and remain intrigued. We go to meet it, at the edge of the light.”
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Diane Frank reads from her new novel, Mermaids and Musicians, wherein a virtuoso violinist falls madly in love with a mermaid, but can he deal with loving a woman who isn’t completely human? And can their love travel through time? The novel begins on Signal Mountain in Tennessee and migrates to the coast of Northern California. As a poet and musician, Diane reveals what it takes to become a musician, what music means to those who play it, and what music gives to the world. “One of the best ways to learn about humans is to listen to their songs.” Every chapter in Mermaids and Musicians sings. With exquisite language, Diane Frank weaves joy and heartbreak, community and loneliness, surrealism and realism into a novel of hope. This delectable book uproots readers from the Appalachian Mountains and transports them to the Pacific coast, following the dreams of various characters, all of them…
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Ben Stolorow, piano. Peter Barshay, bass. Vince Lateano, drums. with guest Erich Ippen, guitar & vocals. $20 cover charge; byob. Students, $10. Kids free. The trio returns for their ongoing 3rd Sundays residency at Bird & Beckett. Leader Vince Lateano has been a cornerstone of the San Francisco jazz scene since he arrived in 1966, gigging and touring assiduously for decades before settling in behind the drum kit as the leader of the house band at Jazz at Pearls, the famous club that was situated in North Beach opposite City Lights on Columbus Avenue just off the corner of Broadway. His jam sessions at Pier 23, the Dog Patch Saloon, the Seven Mile House, Sweeties and Bird & Beckett have been a staple of the local jazz world for decades. Vince’s trio with the great bassist Peter Barshay and the elegant pianist Ben Stolorow has been a feature of…
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Jinx Jones, guitar. Kenan O’Brien, bass. Ken Owen, guitar. cover charge $20; byob. students $10. reservations, call 415-586-3733. Luxurious guitar and exotica. Cool swing and soul with a hot trio. That’s Jinx’s jazz bag! Welcome a true apostle of the many towering gods of the jazz guitar traditions, from Freddie Green to Charlie Christian to Tal Farlow to Wes Montgomery to Barney Kessel to Joe Pass to Kenny Burrell to Grant Green to Emily Remler to Mimi Fox… “Jinx Jones can indeed dazzle, Jones comps while launching melodic lines in a repertoire consisting of standards by Montgomery, Kessel, Lionel Hampton, and Benny Goodman, with his original “Alise” lending a Latin mood. Most impressive is Jones’ arrangement of Miles Davis’ “So What,” mixing percussive rhythm, singe-note passages, and octaves in the modal masterpiece.” Dan Forte, Vintage Guitar Magazine, 2018.
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After 3pm drop in to buy a book or just to commiserate over the failure of our democracy. At 5pm: a reading from Colossus:Current – The Ways and Workings of Water. At 7:30pm: The Jinx Jones Trio plays jazz. ________ At 5pm today, join Sara Biel, Elisa Salasin and Kim Shuck co-editors of Colussus:Current The Ways and Workings of Water the 2025 anthology of Colossus Press along with contributors D.S. Black, Ingrid Keir and Denise Low. This nourishing anthology of gorgeous poems reshapes how we think about water. How one poet recalls the Boxing Day Tsunami, to another’s ideas on the American River, to the myriad ways that water sustains us, the poets gathered here invite us to understand and reimagine how miraculous water truly is. This stellar book is for everyone, everywhere. —Lee Herrick – California Poet Laureate and author of In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected…
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Nothing like it this side of Bernal! Or any other side, really. BYOB and a twenty for the trio!
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The Scott Foster Quintet dives into the South African jazz repertoire, playing the music of Allen Kwela, Dudu Pukwana, Johnny Dyani, Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand), Hugh Masekela and their countrymen. $25 cover charge requested, students $10.
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