653 Chenery Street
in San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood
1-415-586-3733
[email protected]
Open to walk-in trade and browsing
Tuesday to Sunday
noon to six
Live Streams every weekend!
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But nothing beats being in the room with the music & the musicians!
In Hugging My Father’s Ghost, Zack Rogow explores the mystery of the father he never knew. Lee Rogow was a drama critic, glamorous man-about-town in 1950s Manhattan, World War II Navy captain—and died tragically when Zack was only three. With sharp pathos and laugh-out-loud humor, Rogow shows his family caught between assimilation and pride in their immigrant identity. Ona Gritz’s new memoir, Everywhere I Look is about sisterhood, grief, true crime and family secrets. Helen Fremont calls it “profound and beautifully written.” Rachel Simon says, “This is a book that will take hold of your emotions—and, if you’re willing, change you.” Daniel Simpson’s poetry collection Inside the Invisible is, in Ellen Bass’s words, “…a book of faith. Of desire. Of a blind poet asking, So how shall I live inside the invisible? With close attention to detail,the use of dialogue, and curiosity about the limits of communication, [Simpson] interrogates life and chooses to…
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On the 2nd Monday of each month Kim Shuck, San Francisco Poet Laureate Emerita, hosts an on-line poetry reading with two featured poets and an open mic. Tonight’s reading, featuring Kitty Costello and Jesse James Johnson, is a tribute to the poet Mary TallMountain (1918-1994), whose influence on a generation was profound and resonates still. Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/84350265713?pwd=eE84V3BYdWxiSFBHNHhmdUt1WTUzdz09Meeting ID: 843 5026 5713Passcode: 244211 Kitty Costello is a San Francisco author, editor, therapist and teacher. Poet friends who influenced her most include Diane di Prima, who taught her early on how to tap into the creative wellspring within, and Mary TallMountain, with whom she shared the delights and transformative power of writing in community. Kitty is author of Upon Waking: New & Selected Poems, 1977-2017, co-editor of Muslim American Writers at Home: Stories, Essays & Poems of Identity, Diversity & Belonging 2021, and she has served 30 years on the editorial board of Freedom Voices, publishing…
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San Francisco pickers, Trouble Town boil a hot pot of folk, bluegrass, swing, jazz and rock into a rebel blend of music with a big acoustic sound. The band’s musical chemistry and diverse influences have allowed them to pull from a deep musical well and make it a special stew all their own. Trouble Town is led by Western Swing Hall of Famer, Pam Brandon (AKA Belle of Belle Monroe and Her Brewglass Boys) on bass and vocals, with Forrest Allen (Dusty Green Bones Band, Deep Thicket Dwellers) on mandolin and vocals, Mark Ignatius (Burl Haggard, Boots and The Katz, Das Tapes) on guitar and vocals, and Tyler Stegall (The High Water Line) on banjo and vocals. Formed in 2019, they worked through the next two years of the pandemic by performing outdoors in parks and driveways to the delight of music-starved onlookers and ever since has been honing their…
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The RPM3 Jazz trio is devoted to personalized renditions of jazz classics, standards from the Great American Songbook, and Brazilian gems. The members are Bay Area jazz stalwarts and the band is highly swinging and guaranteed to warm you up. Tony Corman, 7-string guitar in M3 tuning. Chuck Bennett, bass. Carrie Jahde, drums. $20 cover – cash or venmo at the door. byob. Jazz guitarist/arranger/composer Tony Corman is a proponent of M3 guitar, a symmetrical system of tuning introduced in 1964 by jazz guitarist Ralph Patt. The M3 system opens the door to a set of beautiful sonorities that are unavailable or impractical with conventional tuning, and Tony exploits this system to reinvent and enrich both classic favorites by Ellington and Gershwin as well as hidden jazz and bossa-nova jewels. Bassist Chuck Bennett has toured with Louis Bellson, the Beach Boys, and Maynard Ferguson. In California, he has played with…
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Keith Saunders, piano Eric Markowitz, bass Smith Dobson V, drums $20 cover charge – cash or venmo at the door byob Continuing in a Club Deluxe vein, three stalwarts of that venue’s jazz bookings converge for ninety minutes of fiery bebop, standards and jazz classics from the music’s glory years. After cutting his teeth in Los Angeles, Keith led the NY Hardbop Quintet in New York releasing four albums in eight years before he migrated to San Francisco, where for 24 years he’s been in the top echelon of players from day one. Eric Markowitz learned much of what he knows about jazz from bussing in as a teen from Jersey to haunt the New York clubs, and most of what he knows about playing the jazz bass from veteran players in St. Louis; he’s learned the rest on innumerable club dates in the Bay Area since his arrival in…
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Veterans of the Bossa Nova! Until we lost the Club Deluxe during the great pandemic, Voz do Brasil was the late Sunday night house band of that legendary Haight Street nitespot and the long-time favorite of its owner, the late Jay Johnson, the Deluxe’s heart and soul. Sao Paulo-born, vocalist Liza Silva toured internationally for years with Walter Wanderley–the man who helped popularize bossa nova in America and around the world in the 60’s with the hit “Summer Samba.” She’s also shared the stage with Brazilian greats including Joao Gilberto, Elsa Soares and Beth Carvalho, with Sade, Boz Skaggs and Bonnie Raitt, with Tito Puente, and with Bay Area luminaries Paula West, Tammy Hall, Wayne Wallace, Denise Perrier and Kim Nalley. For years, Liza has dedicated herself to performing traditional Brazilian repertoire for American and international audiences — Samba, Bossa Nova, Afro-Samba, Forro, Samba-Pagode, Samba-Reggae, Lambada and Carnival styles. The…
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Bird & Beckett presents a featured poet plus open mic reading on the first Thursday of each month. On June 6th, at 7pm, the featured reader will be Kimi Sugioka, the Poet Laureate of Alameda, California. Kimi is a mother, educator, songwriter and poet. Her newest book is Wile & Wing on Manic D Press. Kimi loves cats and birds and believes that creating community through art is a revolutionary act. An open mic follows. All are invited to read in the open. Free. Bird & Beckett’s monthly first Thursdays reading series is co-hosted by Michael Koch and Jerry Ferraz. The woman breathes, by Kimi Sugioka Her breast swells in dream in detritus in perilous fracture The woman holds the child the long spoon the tired baby the old man’s hand the worry like a kettle on a 400,000 year old fire The woman arranges flowers spices contrives encounters decoys…
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The Akira Tana Trio, with Ben Stolorow, piano and Robb Fisher, bass host a jam session for student players welcome from throughout the Bay Area. The jam is preceded by a jazz combo out of San Francisco’s Urban School. Phenomenally talented youth well schooled and ready to forge their own future of jazz!
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Jim Campilongo, guitar Sam Reider, accordion & piano Giulio Xavier Cetto, bass Scott Amendola, drums $20 cover charge; byob. Spaghetti is a quartet formed by the rising star accordionist/pianist Sam Reider (a local prodigy gone global with his genre-busting, bluegrass-adjacent band, The Human Hands) and the renowned veteran guitarist Jim Campilongo (Jim Campilongo & the Ten Gallon Cats and a zillion projects since), featuring drummer Scott Amendola (TJ Kirk et seq) and bassist Giulio Xavier Cetto, the Jazz Thug. Original compositions by Campilongo and Reider collide with tunes by Duke Ellington, Astor Piazzolla, Hank Williams and beyond.
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David Boyce, reeds; PC Muñoz, percussion. $15 cover charge; byob. Red Fast Luck is a Bay Area-based improvising duo consisting of multi-reed sorcerer David Boyce (aka Black Edgar) and electro-acoustic percussionist PC Muñoz. Their EP, “Live in San Francisco”, is one of the featured albums on the San Francisco Public Library’s new curated streaming service, Bay Beats. Their first studio album, “Everything You Do Controls the World”, is out now (2024) on bandcamp; download it here. A new one-off single, “Three-Run Homer”, is also on bandcamp and on all streaming services. David Boyce/Black Edgar Originally from NYC, David Boyce graduated from Cornell University and taught elementary/junior high school in the Bronx. After his plans to move into the city became thwarted due to gentrification and high rents, he moved out to San Francisco just in time for the Loma Prieta earthquake. In 1991 he co-founded the iconic AfroFuturist jazz trio…
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Smith Dobson, drums; Eric Markowitz, bass; Graham Messer, piano. $20 suggested cover charge. $10 for students and teens. kids 12 and under free. byob. A powerhouse trio massing the energy of two bandstand veterans and a young player fast emerging as a fiery voice on piano, proving that bebop lives.
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“In this Boomer memoir, Driving Miss Daisy meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. With lilting eloquence, Summer Brenner captures the tumultuous fifties and sixties of a genteel Jewish family in Atlanta, with the South’s oppressive segregation and anti-Semitism. The family drama is fraught: the brother is a schizophrenic, the mother a Gucci-clad Medusa, and the father a suicide. After extensive travels, Brenner frees herself in the Bay Area to become ‘more beatnik than debutante.’” –James Nolan. Dust (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024) is the latest of the many books published by Summer Brenner since her 1990 short story collection The Dancers and the Dance (Coffee House Press). Along the way, she has brought out a book of novellas, The Missing Lover, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022) with collages by Lewis Warsh; a pair of noir crime novels and four youth social justice novels; as well as a half dozen volumes of poetry. Her…
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Drummer Akira Tana is filling in for Vince Lateano tonight; Vince has a scheduling conflict. Ben Stolorow will be here on piano, together with Peter Barshay on bass. A great opportunity to learn from three seasoned professionals, and a great opportunity for audiences to discover talents they may not even have heard of yet. $20 suggested cover charge for adults. $10 for students. Free to musicians playing in the jam session. byob.
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Jonah Cabral, alto saxophone & leader; Will Berg, tenor saxophone; Armen Krakirian, trumpet; Charles Chen, piano; Alex Farrell, bass; Kirk Duplantis, drums.$20-30 sliding scale cover charge; byob. Jonah Cabral is one of the rising saxophonists in the jazz scene today. He has played throughout the world including South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and extensively in the United States. He has shared the stage with musicians such Carl Alan, Nicholas Bearde, Tiffany Austin, Vince Lateano, Akira Tana and many others. In 2021 Jonah released his first album as a co-leader in dedication to the great Bud Powell and in 2022 he released his solo album recorded live in Tilburg, the Netherlands.
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Eli Knowles – drums; Quinn Gerard – bass; Brett Carson – piano; Rent Romus – saxophone. $20 cover charge; byob. A titan of the San Francisco avant garde scene, both as a saxophonist and with his record label, Edgetone, Rent Romus has just recently established the Spirit Quintet, with a chemistry that’s given him a massive infusion of positive energy. Rent has long led the Lords of Outland, a free improvisation unit; the Life’s Blood Ensemble, a composition-based contemporary group; and the Otherworld Ensemble, a Finnish/American collective exploring new perspectives in heritage and traditional folk. Over the years, he has recorded well over 50 albums, exploring a wide variety of musical settings which have included beat poet founder ruth weiss, and creative music pioneers Chico Freeman, John Tchicai, and Vinny Golia, Teppo Hauta-aho, Heikki Koskinen, Thollem McDonas, Stefan Pasborg, Marcos Fernandez, and Ernesto Diaz-Infante to name a few. He is…
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Your donation to the Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project helps us pay for a multitude of operating expenses necessary to present, promote and preserve local music, poetry, and more.
Help us keep the arts alive and thriving!
The Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project was created in 2007 "to present, document and archive the creative work of significant living writers and musicians in the San Francisco Bay Area, for a neighborhood audience and future generations." We've been doing that very thing for more than a decade and a half, continuing the work we began when the store was established in 1999.
We continue to present a full slate of programming of live music and poetry readings, and produce a literary journal and poetry chapbooks, and we seek and welcome your continued financial support by way of donations through our fiscal sponsor, Jazz in the Neighborhood.
Click on "donate" in the navigation bar above. Better yet, send or drop off a check made out to our fiscal sponsor, Jazz in the Neighborhood, with BBCLP in the memo line. Our mailing address is:
Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project
653 Chenery Street
San Francisco, CA 94131
Call us at (415) 586-3733 to find out how else you might lend your support.
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The Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project
Our events are put on under the umbrella of the Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project (the "BBCLP"). That's how we fund our ambitious schedule of 300 or so concerts and literary events every year.
The BBCLP is a [Read More ]
The Independent Musicians Alliance
Gigging musicians! You have nothing to lose but your lack of a collective voice to achieve fair wages for your work!
The IMA can be a conduit for you, if you join in to make it work.
https://www.independentmusiciansalliance.org/
Read more here - Andy Gilbert's Feb 25 article about the IMA from KQED's site
