In these tumultuous times, we need Tin Cup Serenade’s tragic songs of hope more than ever. Rolf Wilkinson writes the tunes, by and large, sings them and plays guitar, Larry Leight plays trombone and Safa Shokrai plays bass. Nashville Music News glowingly reviewed their most recent album, using the phrase “exuberant melancholy” and that pretty well describes the tone of it.  They quote Rolf, who says “Every song on the album has a bit of pathos and a bit of sunshine. There’s no sadness without happiness, no comedy without tragedy. I like the complexity that results from conflicting emotion.”  The songs, says NMN. evoke a Tin Pan Alley melange of New Orleans Jazz, Calypso, Swing, Mariachi, ragtime, early Country, and traditional Cuban Music. Check the band’s website at this link, and listen in on a few cuts.  

Alan Watts, born near London in 1915, was drawn to Buddhism at a young age, and published his first book in 1936 at age 21, The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work and Art in the Far East. Though he later came to view that book as somewhat naive and superficial, it marked the start of a significant career as a philosopher, religious thinker and public intellectual. Moving to New York in 1938, he pursued Christian and Buddhist philosophies side by side, and made a particularly strong impression with the 1950 publication of The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for An Age of Anxiety. In 1951, Watts moved to California. His radio broadcasts on KPFA beginning in 1953 along with public lectures and numerous books were hugely influential in philosophical and religious circles and in the popular counterculture that blossomed in the Bay Area through the sixties and…

Jeff Hamilton plays piano! A trio with Clint Baker on trumpet and Robert Young on reeds. There are at least two drummers named Jeff Hamilton in the world of exquisite music… the big band (Clayton/Hamilton) drummer and this one. And don’t we love this one! I mean, just take a look at that album cover adjacent! As for the album itself, it hardly ever leaves my cd changer these days!! With luck, you heard this Jeff Hamilton on drums, his stock in trade, with pianist Ray Skjelbred and His Cubs at Bird & Beckett on July 6th. Come September 23rd for a taste of Jeff’s taste when he’s at the keyboard. Brilliant! One charming and funny guy! One brilliant musician!!  

Listen to this track, and come down to the show! “Take the Crowell Train” – written for saxophonist and Bay Area educator Ken Crowell. It burns! Greg Abate, a multi-instrumentalist and an alto player in the tradition of Phil Woods, is a road warrior, says Simon Rowe, director of the SF Conservatory of Music’s new Roots, Jazz and American Music program. He performs all over Europe as well as in Canada and Japan, and is typically on the road 150-225 days a year. In July, Greg toured for three weeks in England and Italy, performing 18 dates in concert halls, churches, jazz societies, schools and festivals. In August and the first few weeks of September, he’s doing 20 dates in Quebec and along the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Connecticut and inland to West Virginia. Then it’s our turn, as Greg flies way out west to play Bird & Beckett on…

Michael? First time Jerry booked him, I mentioned it to a couple regulars. Michael Koch!? Now I know what they mean. You’ll like this reading, so come out…. open mic follows. Jerry Ferraz runs the whole shebang. Ronald Sauer, nb surrealist, pinch hits for Robert Anbian tonight. Welcome to Birdnbeckettlandia!

Soul singer Derek Evans, with wicked Todd Swenson on guitar, Willie Riser on bass and Larry Vann on drums! Yeah, you bet! You don’t want to miss this.

  Grant Levin, piano. Chris Amberger, bass. Jeff Minnieweather, drums. . . . 2, 3, 4 Count it off with Grant Levin! Duos, trios, quartets… every 2nd, 3rd and 4th Sunday of the month  

Celebrating the first two seasons of titles from the independent publisher, Magra Books (magrabooks.com). Gillian Conoley will read from her just published chapbook, Preparing One’s Consciousness for the Avatar, along with Martha Ronk reading from her 2016 title, Unfamiliar Familiar; Art Beck from his new translation, Martial, Epigrams; Dennis Phillips from his Desert Sequence chapbook; and Neeli Cherkovski from his forthcoming Magra chapbook, Odes for Ezra Weston Pound. Part of the presentation will also be a memorial tribute to Ray DiPalma (1943-2016), whose For a Curved Surface is one of Magra’s initial offerings. Based in Los Angeles and Tuscany, Magra Books is a series of chapbooks, printed in editions of 300 copies, featuring unique works by important writers. Each volume, typically 32 pages in length, presents writers who are up to the all-encompassing challenge of producing work that strives to make “news that stays news.” Writers who are passionate about…

Henry Hung, trumpet Scott Foster, guitar Eric Markowitz, bass Omar Aran, drums The Scott Foster Quartet plays the music of Lee Morgan!  Lee Morgan was one of the top jazz trumpet stars of the late 1950s and 1960s, recording prolifically on Blue Note and other labels –featured on John Coltrane’s “Blue Trane” (1957) and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ “Moanin’” (1959) and scoring a huge hit as a leader with his Blue Note LP,  “The Sidewinder” (1963). His Jazz Messengers run produced 24 albums, and he recorded 17 albums as a leader after “The Sidewinder” made his name common parlance. At the break between sets this Friday evening and later following the second set, you’ll meet and hear from jazz scholarm dj and writer Larry Reni Thomas, who contributed substantially to the current  hit film documentary “I Called Him Morgan.” Larry wrote the book “The Lady Who Shot Lee Morgan”…

For a Bob Ernst bio, visit https://www.altertheater.org/about2 towards/away… The focus intensifies as the periphery disperses. Our hero is a stranger in a strange land. He finds himself running for his life in an alien landscape being pursued by something or someone he can’t quite make out. “Am I running towards, or am I running away or am I running towards away?” Fear, and a bit of the blues propels him further on into the desert, towards—? In the final moments, the periphery expands. a poetic narrative, accompanied by a percussion score and other exotic instrumentation, all rolled up tight into the personification of “one tiny, spec of hu-man”. Warning: he does get physical. Like the man says; “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Bob Ernst inhabits a stage as a world of his own devising. Nothing is predictable and everything is possible. He shunts, grunts and howls onomatopoeias…

In 1996, anthropologist Mike Youngblood purchased a second-hand motorcycle in India and spent nearly three years following a massive rural political movement called the Shetkari Sanghatana, spread out across the 120,000 square miles of India’s Maharashtra State.  In his travels, he experienced the movement side-by-side with increasingly rich capitalist farmers, with increasingly poor peasants and rural laborers, and with the paramount leader of the movement who sought to unify them all—a charismatic libertarian whom many followers purported to be a reincarnation of a benevolent “king of demons” from Indian mythology. Youngblood’s prize-winning book, Cultivating Community, explores this movement from the diverse perspectives of its participants. The book suggests new ways to think about leaders and the ordinary people who support them, often seemingly against their own best interests. Youngblood’s book is not just relevant to India—it offers insights on the puzzling nature of politics and political organizing anywhere in the world,…

Second Mondays, starting Monday, September 11th, Bird & Beckett will be hosting a jam session for the incoming class of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s brand new jazz BMUS (Bachelor of Music) degree program. The SFCM’s program is called “Roots, Jazz & American Music” and its first group of thirteen young students, drawn from all over the country, just arrived in town a couple weeks ago.  They’re on a four-year track towards a jazz bachelor’s degree that will ground them in the African roots of the music and take them through its full development and flowering as America’s most truly original musical genre. The RJAM program is directed by new Glen Park neighbor Simon Rowe. Simon is a jazz pianist who hails from Australia, spent a long stretch in St. Louis learning the music from legendary jazz musicians there, and spent the five years through 2016 directing the Brubeck…