$20 cover charge; $10 for students/musicians/low income. Elena Welch is a jazz and blues vocalist greatly influenced by her ten formative and very fun years living in the music city of Chicago, Illinois. She resided on the Big Island of Hawaii for over eight years, where she performed regularly with her quintet as well as with Island Swing Orchestra, a 17-piece traditional swing big band. And she had a fifteen-year run living and performing in the Bay Area before moving up to Portland. She now returns often for appearances in San Francisco, Sonoma and a few other choice spots, reuniting with old friends and colleagues every time. Expect a family affair! Elena has a degree in voice from Columbia College Chicago, where she studied under the direction of William Russo (Stan Kenton’s musical director.) She also attended the Stanford Jazz Vocal Workshop headed up by jazz greats, Madeline Eastman and Sheila Jordan! Elena…

$10-20 suggested donation; $5-10 for students/musicians/low income. Lots of fun and great music with this band, from swing to bop and straight ahead to the now! Youngster Jeffrey Burr plays guitar in the company of four jazz vets — drummer Vince Lateano, trumpeter Al Molina, saxophonist Jerry Logas and bassist Dean Reilly. Dean’s the grand old man of the bunch — was playing at all the North Beach and other major jazz spots in San Francisco in the early 1950s with the likes of Vince Guaraldi, Cal Tjader, Eddie Duran… Al Molina, a San Francisco native from a musical family, has been a fixture locally since the mid-1950s, working with George Cables, Jessica Williams, Eddie Marshall, Eddie Henderson and many more… Vince (Lateano) hit SF in the mid-1960s and fell in with Guaraldi and Tjader (he was in Tjader’s band in the late 1970s and early 1980s), traveled with Woody Herman and was…

    The story of the “hippie trail” through the eyes of a traveler. North Beach writer Terry Tarnoff tells tales of the trail and of some of its more notorious characters. He’ll read passages from his paired memoirs, or are they novels, The Bone Man of Benares and The Reflectionist, and he’ll display artifacts and unspool videos evoking that legendary time.      Terry’s eight years on the road led from London, Stockholm and Amsterdam to the coast of Kenya and the plains of Tanzania, to the deserts of India and the mountains of Nepal, to the war-torn villages of Laos and the islands of Indonesia. Along the way, he explored Hinduism and Buddhism, played with an African band in Mombasa, performed as a singer-guitarist in the Far East, and was a founding member of a rock band in Goa.     In Kathmandu, Terry managed the infamous Spirit Catcher Bookstore for a…

Always a good idea to Swing Left when kicking off a little celebration of a well-earned national holiday, don’t you think?! Especially this one! Come down Friday after work to catch Rob Reich & his comrade cultural workers in the big little band called Swings Left. They’ll have your toes tappin’ and your muscles jitterbuggin’, so take a break from your labors & start the celebration! And later that selfsame Labor Day weekend Friday night, Judy Butterfield and Mean to Me will build you a perfect cup of their intoxicating brew of love & desire. You’ll find your mojo working right away with the weekend’s first taste of washboard percussion, shaky jake trumpet, bop-o-matic piano and sultry vocals. That spirited little spiked koffee klatch kicks off at 9 pm, and it’ll keep you swooning right up to 11 pm.  If that ain’t work, it’ll have to do, until the real thing…

Jerry Ferraz and Kim Shuck, San Francisco Poet Laureate, book and host our twice-monthly poetry series. Tonight, we’re pleased to present Charlie Getter and Aqueila M. Ross, with an open mic to follow. Charlie Getter writes poems in San Francisco. He shouted them from a street corner for fifteen years, now he’s practicing being quieter. He’s nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is, he also hasn’t aged particularly well and his choice in attire hints at an internal shabbiness. Although he doesn’t seem to have any obvious deformity, he seems to walk with what might be a limp, but it’s difficult to say what side, if any, he favors. He has a bearing that would suppose that if a bird shat upon him, he would notice, but very possibly, wouldn’t do anything about it. It is said he has a dog. As an award-winning spoken word artist and journalist,…

$10-15 suggested donation. $5 for students, musicians and low income. One Sunday afternoon, two rockin’ bands on one bookshop stage!   Jimbo Trout & the Fish People + The Deep Basement Shakers   Aaron Hammerman and Dave Eagle are the Deep Basement Shakers, delivering some primal, joint-rockin’, steady-rollin’ barrelhouse blues n’ boogie from the deep musical traditions of places like St. Louis, Texas, Chicago and New Orleans. Instrumental stuff from the 20’s, 30’s through to the early days of R&B, Jimmy Yancey to Clarence Lofton, Professor Longhair to Cow Cow Davenport & Meade Lux Lewis, Maxwell Street to Frenchman Street, they dig into the ancient styles of the new century… the 20th century, that is… “But this ain’t no history museum where you can’t touch the glass,” say the Shakers… Aaron Hammerman, piano, kazoo and vocals Dave Eagle, washboard, suitcase, spoons, bones, bells & whistles   Jimbo Trout & the Fish…

$20 cover charge; $10 for students, musicians, low income. Grant Levin, piano Jack Tone Riordan, guitar Erik von Buchau, vibes Tomoko Funaki, bass Rick Rivera, drums A piano-guitar-vibes configuration inspired by a stormy day’s immersion in the classic live 1958 George Shearing Quintet recording, “George Shearing on Stage!” That lp featured pianist Shearing in the company of guitarist Jean Thielemans, vibraphonist Emil Richards, bassist Al McKibbon, conguero Armando Peraza and traps drummer Percy Brice. Grant and his confederates will take the music wherever they want, for your pleasure. Not a hotplate re-creation of a classic, but rather an original concoction made to showcase the freshest San Francisco jazz flavors. [arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp0fx-QsYCI” /]  

$20 cover charge; $10 for students, musicians, low income. Mean to Me resurrects classic jazz of the 1920s through ’40s filtered through the unique sensibilities of the band, which boasts a proclivity for bop, soul and latin jazz as well. Think Monk sauntering up Tin Pan Alley and turning onto Bourbon Street… Sweet and low down, and always swingin’. Mingus is there… Ahmad Jamal, too… Mean to Me’s core comprises Judy Butterfield, trained as a cabaret singer but with an abiding love for soul music; Ben Slater, a pianist whose interest in exploring the roots of jazz grew from time spent living in New Orleans; and Dave Shaff, a trumpeter drawn to some more modern and funky sounds. All three grew up in San Francisco and have played together on and off for ten years now. They know how to have a good time, and so do their confederates: Scott…

$10-20 suggested donation. $5 for students / musicians / low income Rob Reich, piano; Ben Goldberg, clarinet; Andrew Stephens, trumpet; Ollie Dudek, bass; Eric Garland, drums. Rooted in the classic swing music of the late 1930s, Swings Left plays tunes of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Artie Shaw, as well as many of Rob’s original tunes in this style, combining hot rhythms with a cool sensibility.

$10-20 suggested donation; $5-10 for students, musicians, low income. Singer Darlene Langston is featured with the band, with Noel Weidcamp on cornet, John Hunt on trombone, Don Neely on clarinet, soprano sax and alto sax, Si Perkoff on piano, Duncan James on guitar, Al Obidinski on bass and Greg Gotelli on drums. The BVJB evokes the hot era of Chicago jazz in the 1920s and ’30s, when a bunch of white kids who called themselves the Austin High Gang were riding high, creating hot jazz that took its own crazy trajectory from the music of New Orleans. And it takes the music to New York, where guitarist Eddie Condon opened a club in 1945 that favored this music and the talents of Chicagoans and allied musicians like pianist Ralph Sutton, clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, trumpeters Wingy Manone and Max Kaminsky, organist Wild Bill Davison and countless others. Though the root music…

Walker’s back from his summer rambles. Come out to hear some of what he’s been ruminating about out there on the road! Walt Whitman, the good grey poet, saeth Walker, “is evermore my guide as I now grow grey. The literary field of action is one of perception and notation, especially related to journeys and rambles [there’s that word!], as well as memories and archetypal landscapes and characters.” And a quote from ol’ Walt himself: “I am fain to fancy the foundation of quite a lesson learned…Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes may seem breaths of common air, or draughts of water to drink. But that is part of our lesson.”

Start your weekend out at Bird & Beckett Friday evening with the relaxed bop & swing of the 230 Jones Street Band, then grab a taco and come back for the late show, when Beth Custer and Stephen Kent’s Trance Mission deploys clarinets, didgeridoo and percussion to take you there… Saturday morning, Andre Custodio’s Audible Method deploys synthesizers & processors we can’t possibly fathom to dive into ambient depths we fully perceive only on a subliminal plane! So wander the stacks and let your mind go where it wants. Saturday night, jazz club swings into play at 7:30 as four solid senders known as the North Berkeley Jazz Quartet will deliver two satisfying sets of jazz, ranging across bebop, latin and straight ahead terrain… And then it’s Sunday! Jerry Ferraz explores the workings of his guitar and memory beginning around 11:30, and Walker Brents takes the stage at 2:30 to cogitate…

$20 cover charge; $10 for students / musicians / low income Ian Carey, trumpet Keith Saunders, piano Robb Fisher, bass Ron Marabuto, drums [arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlTxPby7eaQ” /] The North Berkeley Jazz Quartet comprises veteran professionals drawn together about five years ago by geographic proximity, common long experience in top-level gigging on the national and international stage, plenty of bandstand associations in a variety of situations over the years, and a shared affinity for latin, bebop and straight ahead jazz. Bassist Robb Fisher came to prominence in the mid-1970s working with Cal Tjader and Pancho Sanchez as well as Art Pepper, Carmen McCrae, Clare Fischer, Tania Maria and Anita O’Day. Locally, he’s worked extensively with the likes of Akira Tana, Eddie Marshall, Peter Horvath, Vince Lateano, Mark Levine, Mel Martin and George Cotsirilos.  Robb says he finds it very inspiring to play with this group. All, including mainstay player Bob Kenmotsu, who’s off in Japan…

$15 cover charge. $10 for the merely curious. $5 for students / musicians / low income Didjeridu, percussion and cello-sintir meets, for the n-thousandth time, B flat, alto and bass clarinets and percussion in the original formulation of Trance Mission. Notable performances of the duo and its descendants include Maybeck Studio, Live Oak Festival, Freight & Salvage, Slim’s, Palm’s Playhouse, Yoshi’s and many more. The digital aura remarkably marries the indigenous instrumentation with a rare naturalness, resonating with the full flame of world-derived trance power. — Sam Prestianni A unique Aboriginal, African and European fusion. Their rhythmic, trance-inducing music for didgeridoo, drums and synthesizer makes a perfect soundtrack. — j. poet This is such deep, exploratory, soulful music…unlike anything I’ve ever heard. It’s world music, yes, but at the same time its progressive, jazzy, tribal, traditional, jamming, driving, trance rhythms…I hear something new everytime I put this CD on. — PG, Dirty Linen

$10-20 suggested donation; $5 for students / musicians / low income Talk about your San Francisco jazz… On the fourth Friday of each month, our weekly jazz in the bookshop series features the 230 Jones Street, Local 6 Literary Jazz Band — aka The Chuck Peterson Quintet, named for the guy who started it all 16 years ago! The five musicians who make up the current band share a history in the local jazz scene that dates back 60 years, to the 1950s & ’60s. Ray Loeckle, tenor sax Jerry Logas, baritone sax, clarinet, flute and vocals Glen Deardorff, guitar Dean Reilly, bass Tony Johnson, drums