Trumpet player Kenny Warren touring from his base New York City is joined by San Francisco players Raffi Garabedian, sax; Miles Wick, bass; Jon Arkin, drums. $10-20 sliding scale cover charge. Kenny Warren has been active in New York’s improvised music scene since 2006. His quartet’s 2017 release “Thank You for Coming to Life” on Whirlwind Recordings has been hailed as “Boldly creative and superbly orchestrated… A masterful album… Stunning” by France’s Radio REC. He has released two LPs with his song-writing outfit Laila and Smitty which Bird is the Worm calls “massively genuine and unabashedly heart-on-the-sleeve open and honest.” He is a frequent collaborator/sideman in a number of NYC music circles. Kenny grew up in Denver, CO, a city with a rich tradition of creative trumpet playing. You can listen and buy Kenny’s music on Bandcamp. Raffi Garabedian (tenor saxophone) hails from Berkeley, California, and attended Berkeley High School,…

  Tom Griesser on sax and clarinet Scott Foster on guitar Scott Chapek on bass   Musical associations that date back many years for Scott… …as he says, it’ll be like old times, good times! $10-20 suggested donation  

At the legendary Sun Studios in February 2017, two sidemen on a recording session bonded over 1950s rock’n’roll music.  Returning to New York, they discovered they were Harlem neighbors, and the Harlem River Noise was born. Kyle Lacy & Cody Gibson, Harlem River Noise, take the stage with a quartet at Bird & Beckett Thursday evening just before hitting the highway to Viva Las Vegas this weekend. As Harlem River Noise, a quartet that played 161 dates in 2018, they dive deep into the rockabilly born from New Orleans R&B’s marriage to Memphis country & gospel. Recorded live to tape in 2017, their album “Currents” captures a marathon 2-day recording session. Two tracks from the album, ‘I’ve Been Shakin’ and ‘South to Carolina,’ were featured on the Nashville DJ James Riley’s Rockabilly + Blues Radio Hour. Adobe & Teardrops called the album “a breezy stroll (or lindy hop) through Saturday…

Cosmopolitan pillars of the North Beach poetry scene, Ronald Sauer and Agneta Falk have riveted poetry audiences in cafes and auditoriums, on outdoor festival stages, in vast amphitheaters and narrow alleyways… they return to Bird & Beckett with poems in hand… Agneta Falk was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1946. She is a poet, visual artist, editor and translator.  In her twenties she moved to England, and in 1998 she moved to San Francisco. Ronald F. Sauer is a poet/New Yorker in North Beach, San Francisco. A compulsive talker, musician, artist, art collector & curator, translator of Baudelaire (and many a great French poet), Summa-cum-laude for Horizontal Angelology (Ph.d, Oxymoron Divinity School), upstart cosmologist, aficionado of insomniac starlight, the bane of pretense, philately and cheeky ducks; he is also haberdasher to the blithely impoverished.  

The Seducers have had a monthly gig at Bird & Beckett for three years, playing classic, outlaw and honky tonk songs by the likes of Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, Bobby Bare, plus originals and a few from left field. Look for the Seducers every second Sunday in San Francisco’s premier little bookshop/listening room. Bring a beer if that’s your inclination, but for one outing a month you’ll get a nice break from the barroom clatter that can sometimes obscure the beauty of these fabulous bits of American genius. You won’t regret it for a minute. BYOB and kick back. It all makes for a lovely way to spend a Sunday evening before returning to the working grind. Joe Goldmark, pedal steel guitar Mitch Polzak, lead guitar and vocals Hank Maninger, bass guitar and vocals Kenny Owen, drums $10-20 suggested donation. $5 for students/musicians/fixed income.

Lewis Jordan (saxophone and vocal) Sandi Poindexter (violin) Karl Evangelista (guitar) Erich Olen Hunt (bass) Jimmy Biala (drums and percussion) Lewis Jordan…plays a mean sax, sweet and mellow, sharp and staccato, richly complex, as the mood demands.  Jordan is a triple threat– a virtuoso on alto saxophone, a deft and ingratiating comic actor and a poetically humorous writer. — Robert Hurwitt Music at Large is Lewis’ vehicle for jazz expression.  Much can be learned about the man and the artist from his website at www.lewisjordan.com. Saxophonist Lewis Jordan writes: I began Music at Large in 1976, dedicated to interdisciplinary and multicultural productions, with presentations incorporating music, theater, dance, poetry and visual art.  Since that time, Music at Large has been a vehicle for producing musical performances of my own and others’ work, plays, and panels. The genesis of the Music at Large is the commitment to bringing people together by bridging arbitrary distinctions that…

Publisher Lucille Lang Day and poet Joan Gelfand are joined by several Bay Area colleagues who are among the 150 contributors throughout the state whose poems make up Fire & Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018).  Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, edited by Lucille Lang Day and Ruth Nolan, is not only a beautiful and thorough anthology but an homage to California, its varieties of landscapes, and the amazing poetry it has evoked. Like no other collection in its focus, it presents for the reader experiences of life and personal perspectives on the region while also providing an invaluable resource for teachers of creative writing and literature and the ecology, habitats, and species of the state.” — Pattiann Rogers, recipient of the John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry

James Mahone Quartet James Mahone, saxophone Grant Levin, piano Aaron Cohn, bass Hamir Atwal, drums Two sets of jazz standards by four of the Bay Area’s best

Each year since his death in 2011, Eddie Marshall’s working band has reunited to play his compositions, with his son, Alcide, in the drum chair. This year the group will be presenting a treasure trove of “new” gems, tunes Eddie left behind when he passed. The group has been decoding, reconstructing, and rehearsing them, and is thrilled to present them to the public – some for the first time!

Grant Levin, piano Chris Amberger, bass Mark Lee, drums

2nd year! Students in the SF Conservatory of Music’s “Roots, Jazz & American Music” BMUS degree program host their peers from Bay Area colleges and high schools. No cover charge. Donations to support the bookshop that supports the students are very much appreciated.

Brittany Biala, saxophone, leads a trio featuring Helen Orzel, keyboard, and Jonny Kaminek, bass. With 14 years of experience, Brittany graduated with a BM in Jazz Studies on tenor saxophone in 2017. Her sound has been uniquely shaped by her father’s vast collection of vintage American horns and early exposure to funk, as well as her abiding love for Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane and the influence of Chris Potter and Joel Frahm. She currently performs with many ensembles, including the 7th Street Big Band, Bitches Brew, Amy Unauthorized, the Brittany Biala Jazz Combo and many freelance jazz combos. Helen Orzel, the secret love child of Wonder Woman and Ludwig Van Beethoven, was raised by a pack of lions and a piano. She studied classical performance at CSU Northridge then later in Germany and Serbia, played and toured, but alas… classical music wasn’t her destiny. The answer came to her in a bar.…

What is poetry? What is the poet’s role? Is there a future for this ancient art? Does poetry constitute an ideology? Poet Neeli Cherkovski will talk on these and other issues in a provocative evening in Glen Park.

The Jazz Philanthropists Union presents… Erik Jekabson, trumpet Kasey Knudsen, saxophone Keith Saunders, piano John Wiitala, bass David Flores, drums

Al Molina, trumpet; Jerry Logas, reeds, flute & vocal; Larry Chinn, piano; Dean Reilly, bass; Vince Lateano, drums. Bop & swing from five solid senders. The long-running Friday after work jazz party at Bird & Beckett has never paused since it started 17 years ago! Contribute what you can to help us pay the musicians!