$20 cover charge; $10 for students/musicians/low income. Traveling out of New York City, guitarist Roni Ben-Hur, bassist Harvie S. and drummer Sylvia Cuenca join forces with San Francisco pianist David Udolf and vocalist Sherri Roberts for two sets of jazz! Guitarist Roni Ben-Hur– born in Israel in 1962 but a longtime American citizen, based in New York City—has recorded more than a dozen albums as leader or co-leader. Known for his sweet tone, infectious rhythm, lush harmonies and innovative improvisation, Ben-Hur effortlessly straddles the world of straight ahead jazz and the realm of samba jazz, evidenced by his work with masters in both fields, from pianist Barry Harris to vocalist Leny Andrade. His work has consistently earned him accolades from prestigious media outlets. The New York Times praised his “crisp, fluid style” and Time Out New York called him “a formidable and consummately lyrical guitarist.” The New York City Jazz record…

$10-20 suggested donation; $5 for students/musicians/low income. The volcanic creativity and technique of Grant Levin has been thrilling San Francisco jazz fans for the past decade and shows no signs of abating! Saxophonist Noel Jewkes, bassist Tomoko Funaki and drummer Mark Lee join Grant for two sets of bop, latin & straight ahead jazz.

“We were still in the boundless void, striped here and there by a streak or two of hydrogen around the vortexes of the first constellations. I admit it required very complicated deductions to foresee the Mesopotamian plains black with men and horses and arrows and trumpets, but, since I had nothing else to do, I could bring it off.”  ― Italo Calvin, Cosmicomics Lisa Mezzacappa, an avant garde jazz bassist with a quickly growing international reputation, is one of the leading lights of the San Francisco jazz community. Her questing intellect and curiosity have time and again led her to compose extended suites of music revolving around a literary theme, such as the recent “AvantNoir” project which employed a sextet to create a musical counterpart to the crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Paul Auster. With her current project, she tackles the fanciful and quirky work of the brilliant Italian writer…

M + M + M + M 4 Poets at Bird & Beckett A mellifluous evening of poetry by Miriam Bird Greenberg, Margaret Stawowy, Melissa Stein & Maw Shein Win Macaroons, meringue & merlot will be served Miriam Bird Greenberg is the author of In the Volcano’s Mouth, which won the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and the chapbooks All night in the new country and Pact-Blood, Fevergrass. Recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Poetry Foundation, she’s written about the nomads, hitchhikers, and hobos living on America’s margins, and is currently at work on a fieldwork-derived manuscript about economic migrants and asylum seekers of Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, she was a writer in residence at the National University of Singapore in 2017. Margaret Stawowy grew up on the southwest side of Chicago in the Back of the…

With the commencement of their second year, the sophomore class of students in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s new “Roots, Jazz & American Music” Bachelor’s degree program hosts the incoming SFCM RJAM freshman class and peers from colleges and high schools throughout the Bay Area in a monthly jam session! This is an exciting opportunity to watch and hear the development of young talent over eight sessions through the school year. No cover charge. Donations to support the bookshop that supports the students are very much appreciated.

$10-20 suggested donation; $5-10 for students / musicians / low income. Joe Goldmark, pedal steel guitar; Mitch Polzak, lead guitar and vocals; Hank Maninger, bass guitar and vocals; Kenny Owen, drums. The Seducers have had a monthly gig at Bird & Beckett for nearly 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.

$10-20 suggested donation; $5-10 for students/musicians/low income. David Byrd, saxophone and vocals; Grant Levin, piano; Joe McKinley, bass; Dylan Garrison, drums. David Byrd is unique in his penchant for infusing a heavy reggae vibe into his bebop and modal jazz, though just as often he stays right there in solid jazz territory, always with massive respect paid to the influences of Charlie Parker & John Coltrane, Eddie Jefferson, Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt and the whole body of Chicago and Detroit players…  He was born and raised on the musical mecca of 47th street in Chicago, where his uncle, Red Saunders was the drummer and bandleader at the famous Regal Theatre. On the same block of 47th and Drexel Blvd. where he lived, jazz greats like Gene Ammons played at the Southerland Hotel. Mr. Byrd went to the jam sessions that were hosted by Sonny Stitt at the Grass Hut on 79th…

Writer-contributors including Margaret Cooley, Keith Cooley, Nellie Wong, Jerry Path, and Alice Rogoff gather to read their work as well as the work of co-contributors Phyllis Holiday and Adele Kearney, and to celebrate the publication of the new LaborFest Writers Anthology! It’s hot off the press. Live music by the Union Bugs! Giving Voice: LaborFest Writers Anthology 2005-2018 including works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry  Read stories about the lives and struggles of laborers, farmers, cooks, cowboys and coal miners from China, Ireland, Britain, rural Wisconsin and the Old West.

$20 cover charge; $10 for students/musicians/low income. Matthew Charles Heulitt – guitar Matt Renzi – clarinet/sax Tim Bulkley – drums Dan Feiszli – acoustic bass Matthew Charles Heulitt, in his guitar work and compositions, seeks the “intangible beauty that only music can communicate.” With three highly skilled and sympatico jazz colleagues well-suited to pursue the musical conversation set in motion by Heulitt, the quartet will explore new compositions, contemporary arrangements, classic jazz repertoire and simple jazz forms that lend themselves to rich possibilities. “Heulitt’s expressive guitar is central to the music but never hijacks the compositions which are more about structure, mood and pace than exhibitionism. For sure, Heulitt can ring a great solo, but has the knack of doing so in a gradual and subtle manner not unlike Bill Frisell…” –Ian Patterson, AllAboutJazz.com Says Heulitt, “While my writing seems to naturally be incredibly detailed and intricate, there will be a…

$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…