Bob Kenmotsu, tenor sax
Keith Saunders, piano
Eric Markowitz, bass
Tony Johnson, drums

Bebop, hardbop, soul jazz and standards. Always swinging, always impeccably played, always with pleasure

BYOB and a twenty for the band,
or any amount large or small you can manage!
A guaranteed fair wage starts with the revenue
that can be gathered from those who enjoy the
fruits of the musicians’ labor. That includes those
who prefer to stay home to enjoy the live stream,
naturally! If you’re in that number, pony up if you
possibly can! We can tell you how, if you can’t quite
figure it.

This quartet represents the long run of jazz that spilled out the Haight Street bar called the Club Deluxe, lovingly run for decades, hands on, by the raconteur and singer Jay Johnson and then continued for another decade much to our delight, filling the night, and sometimes the noonday, with live music.

The musicians at the Deluxe weren’t lavished with pay for their work except when the place was jumping with mostly alcohol-fueled partying, though those nights were very profitable indeed. We’re hoping to see an era emerge in San Francisco when musicians can report to a job and know they’re going to earn decent money regardless of the vagaries of the audience. That will require that places routinely presenting live music be assisted in meeting the pay of our treasured culture workers, whether by allied nonprofits and philanthropists, by tax-base derived funds from the public coffers, whatever it takes. The Independent Musicians Alliance is working as a solidarity alliance of activist musicians to make that happen. Lean on your local club and your local musicians to join the movement!

Hard to enjoy the coffee when you know the plantation workers are starving and dying to get the beans to market for you. Hard to enjoy that nice shirt when the textile workers are making pennies a day. Take a stand with your dollar. Spend it on fair trade and fair wage companies and establishments, and pressure your political representatives to throw their weight behind the movement. Keep our culture workers from throwing up their hands and moving to low rent cities just to survive, leaving San Francisco a culture desert, or at least a market where only amateurs and hobbyists, wonderful as they often are, provide the art we seek and love.

Musicians: There’s an IMA meeting at the store at 4 on Monday, July 24th. Come down and join up if you haven’t already! We’ll buy you some pizza & set up our backline on stage for a jam… stay as long as you like. Bird & Beckett isn’t going anywhere… thanks to the support of the community of jazz fans and jazz musicians that make it sizzle and the patrons that see to it that we stay solvent!