A few years ago, while Dorothy was still singing with the band and the late Howie Dudune played clarinet and sax, exquisitely! Nowadays, the group has Ray Loeckle and Jerry Logas on reeds.

Friday, October 27th, Chuck Peterson returns to Bird & Beckett for an anniversary outing of the 230 Jones Street, Local 6 Literary Jazz Band, which he created years ago with, first, Bill Perkins and then the late Howard Dudune sharing the front line.

Friday jazz in the bookshop was Chuck’s baby from the beginning, 15 years ago!

Back in October 2002, Chuck approached the proprietor and suggested that if he could be guaranteed a place to play every week, he’d see to it that we’d have good jazz players willing to work for whatever we could manage. Chuck was a known quantity to us, a neighborhood guy and a veteran on the jazz scene — first arriving at San Francisco State in 1950. from Portland’s Reed College. He and a cohort of players went on to long professional careers in the Bay Area, making a lot of noise on the union front as well (hence the name of the current band). What started as a trio grew like Topsy, without divine intervention, just hard work and a basic unconcern with doing anything other than making a career of playing music.

Chuck retired to Santa Rosa not long ago — though he’s pretty well evacuated from that town at the moment due to the fires [actually, as it turns out based on a conversation Friday,  he’s stayed in place and seems ok, though we’ll be glad when his travail is through].

Friday, the 29th, Chuck will be coming into town to join his colleagues Ray Loeckle and Jerry Logas on the front line, with long-time rhythm section associates Glen Deardorff (guitar), Dean Reilly (bass) and Tony Johnson (drums).

We’ll have six musicians to pay tonight, and it’s a major celebration for the shop and its jazz policy, so please step up to the extent you can — $20 in the donation buckets per adult if you’re economically up to it will be greatly appreciated. But don’t stay away for want of funds! This is the people’s music and we want you to come and enjoy it in the company of your friends and neighbors.

Keep in mind while you’re here enjoying the music that a living wage was something Chuck and his cohorts really agitated for in their prime, and Bird & Beckett has recently really joined forces with Jazz in the Neighborhood and the folks at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music to tackle the idea of making it more reasonable economically to be a working professional jazz musician in San Francisco in 2017.

We haven’t achieved our goal of making $150 per musician per date a regular thing, but we’re working on it — and part of that is convincing audiences that they need to step up to the collection plate to make it work. Help us pay the musicians! They earn it!