Glen Park has never been without live jazz on a Friday night since the Chuck Peterson Trio got the ball rolling!

This time, with Gaea Schell on piano and John Wiitala on bass, for the first time in the store’s 20-year history or presenting live jazz by the Bay Area’s fantastic musicians, we had no live audience due to a little thing going around, globally. But we streamed the performance out to the world and people all over creation got a great show.

You can see and hear the evidence at this link:
Gaea Schell & John Wiitala Duo Live at Bird & Beckett, 3/20/20

Folks tuned in from the neighborhood, all around the Bay Area, down in Ventura, over in Australia… and donated generously online through the website. Enough that we were able to pay $200 to each of the musicians for their fine artistry and generous spirit.

And we were back at it the next night, Saturday, March 21st, when the young jazz guitarist Kai Lyons took the Bird & Beckett stage with his colleagues Javier Santiago on piano and Giulio Xavier Cetto on bass!

While you wait for your next opportunity to hear live jazz in person at Bird & Beckett, listen to these audio clips of Gaea on piano with the late great Richie Cole in a quintet date at the bookshop just six months prior, on October 25, 2019, when the house was packed and the audience was all the way live!

Richie Cole, what a legend! What a madman of the alto saxophone. Thanks to Gaea and her colleague, the Neapolitan drummer Peppe Merolla, Richie’s good friend, for bringing Richie into Bird & Beckett for a memorable night of wailing bebop, with Modesto Briseño on trumpet and Eric Markowitz on bass.

We’ve just lost Richie to the cosmos, but  he lives on brilliantly in his music!

Gaea and John are very much still with us, and will return time and again to Bird & Beckett as time and the culture roll on! Don’t be a stranger! You need the culture and the culture needs you!

Here’s where to donate to support the Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project – our nonprofit organization that makes all this culture available to you!