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!
Refresh your browser to catch a show in progress!
Visit our Facebook page or YouTube channel!
But nothing beats being in the room with the music & the musicians!
Dr. Mwanza Furaha & Chocolate Medicine  An “Art Is Health” Band  featuring Mwanza Furaha, vocals; Michael McQuilkin, piano; Pierre Archain, bass; Marty Garner, drums; jazz & soul, to take you where you need to be… good times to make you feel good! catch a little bit of Mwanza and the band at this link: Chocolate Medicine
Read MoreConcurrent with a poetry reading, and in the same shared bookshop space, we’re providing ten stamped postcards to each person interested in sending an appeal to Electoral College members in swing states. Â Respect the poetry reading going on this evening, but that shouldn’t stop you from writing a brief message and addressing a handful of postcards to try to convince these Electoral College members that a vote for the national popular vote winner would be a true act of democracy. You just have to jot your quick “please cast your vote for the popular vote winner” message and we’ll put them in the mailbox Tuesday morning. It’s quicker than your last trip to the polls! Just drop in, take care of the business of democracy and head on! Need clarification? Call the bookshop at 415-586-3733 and ask for Eric. I’ll call you back if I miss your call.
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Monday, November 21st – 7-9 pm
Poets Charles Curtis Blackwell and Ronald Sauer
followed by an open mic
Charles Curtis Blackwell’s poetry is suffused with soul, drenched with blues, sparked by jazz. His painting and drawing is likewise deep and personal. He’s one of a handful of poets we know whose articulations of joy, pain and insight always jump from the page, and from his mouth when he reads his work before an audience, We expect that we’ll have a good audience for him tonight. Ronald Sauer’s cosmopolitanism, his intellectual ardor, his engagement with the arts, make him an extravagantly deep poet as well. A frequent translator of the French decadent and surrealist poets of the late 19th through mid-20th centuries, today he will concentrate on translations from the Italian of contemporary North Beach painter and poet Lucia Gonella. Jerry Ferraz, a philosopher as much as a poet, referees the whole wrestling match, including the open mic that follows the featured readers. We should note that we have…
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Bassist Charles Thomas covers jazz, R&B, funk, classical and many points in the musical spectrum, but it’s clearly jazz that absorbs him most fully, and never more fully than when he’s in the company of pianist Grant Levin and drummer Mark Lee. No better way to spend your Sunday afternoon than to be at Bird & Beckett soaking up the music!
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Dean Reilly was right at the center of the wave of San Francisco jazz that came out of North Beach in the 1950s, playing bass in Vince Guaraldi’s first trio starting in 1956. In 1962, he went on the road with the Kingston Trio and that lasted for a couple of decades, helping put Dean’s kids through college. Along the way he recorded with Helen Humes, Cal Tjader, George Barnes and others. He’s still every bit the consummate, hip bassist he was in the 1950s. You can hear him monthly at Bird & Beckett in the 230 Jones Street, Local 6 Literary Jazz Band in the company of colleagues he’s know for 50 years. And you can hear him tonight leading a little trio with old friends Frank Phipps (trombone) and Allen Klein (guitar). Celebrate San Francisco jazz history tonight at jazz club!
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Walter Savage turns 75 on November 16th, and his musical life dates back 65 years to the age of ten.  Tonight, we’ll celebrate his birthday and his life in jazz, as Walter takes to the stage by himself for the first half of the evening to play some music and tell stories. In the second half, he’ll lead a trio with Bennie Watson on piano and Vince Lateano on drums, with special guests. Superlative musicians all! Walter himself is a marvelous and seasoned musician, a singer, a raconteur, a fascinating spinner of tales. Walter grew up in Watts, where his father was a preacher and where he couldn’t imagine not singing– which he loves, though it’s as a bassist that he’s best known. He picked up the bass while serving in the military in the 1960s, and never really looked back. Once back in Los Angeles, he took lessons…
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Bassist Bing Nathan and drummer Dennis Norby have been associated with pianist Eric Shifrin for decades, and the three made up the first iteration of The In Crowd, a good time trio steeped in jazz and more eclectic material that grew up in the time of the 1990s San Francisco swing dance scene. The In Crowd, with a number of great players coming and going and coming back again, has always had Eric Shifrin at its heart. Â Eric is just the king of the San Francisco saloon pianists, putting together a pleasing repertoire that goes from Cole Porter to Hoagy Carmichael to Gene Autry. The In Crowd has been charming the swells, swindlers and stand-up guys in bars and bistros from the Barbary Coast to Nob Hill for decades and shows no signs of flagging.
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Peter Shapiro was trained as a labor historian at Berkeley in the early 1970s, then left academia and became a letter carrier for the USPS, working as a labor journalist in his spare time — ten years as labor editor of Unity, published by the League of Revolutionary Struggle, then editing the Oakland Postal Worker and later the B-Mike (the organ of the National Association of Letter Carriers Branch 82 in Portland, and recipient of multiple awards during his tenure there). Shapiro was on the ground in Watsonville as an activist and as Unity labor editor during the strike he details in this book. On September 9, 1985, 1,000 mainly Mexican women workers in Watsonville, California, the “frozen food capital of the world,†were forced out on strike in response to an attempt by Watsonville Canning owner Mort Console to break their union. The workers remained out for eighteen months, during which time…
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Bring your kids to Bird & Beckett for a wolf-themed craft and story time. Emma Bland Smith (San Francisco’s Glen Park and Diamond Heights, Arcadia Publishing, 2007) will read her new picture book, Journey: Based on the True Story of OR7, the Most Famous Wolf in the West. Following Emma’s reading, kids can make a beautiful wolf collage to take home. (Stickers and stamps will also be on hand!) Adults and kids alike are invited to chat with Emma about the extraordinary roving canis lupus, OR7 (aka “Journeyâ€), and to learn more about wolves in California. Emma is a children’s book author, author of the Glen Park book from Arcadia Pub., and a librarian with the San Francisco Public Library. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Alex, and their two kids, Everett and Cate.
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Tenor saxophone giants David Boyce and Phillip Greenlief join forces on the front line of guitarist Scott Foster’s quintet tonight, with the solid support of bassist Adam Gay and drummer Cairo McCockran Two sets of nimble, blistering and just plain deep jazz by great San Francisco jazz players! If you haven’t made it to Bird & Beckett’s  Saturday night series, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. It’s focused, intimate and wildly satisfying!
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two sets of  joyous jazz interplay on piano and bass
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Howard Dudune passed away September 24th, and all that are left are memories… and fortunately, at least one magnificent recording; undoubtedly more. Howie was a joy to hear from the first, a talent you could scarcely comprehend, joyfully exquisite time and again. Eddie Duran-Jazz Guitarist, with Dean Reilly on bass and John Markham on drums, displays Howie’s extravagantly wonderful talent in extravagantly wonderful company. Howie played beautifully at Bird & Beckett the night before he died, too, and no one could have imagined that he’d be gone so suddenly. He’ll be missed, but he’ll live on through the music. Come celebrate Howie on all Fridays to come, and especially on the 21st when Scott Foster provides the music, the 22nd when Eddie Duran, Dean Reilly, Mad Duran, Noel Jewkes and Vince Lateano play a date, meant to include Howie, celebrating in significant part the 1956 album mentioned above and celebrating…
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Gordon Jack has wanted to be a novelist since he was a kid.  He ranked it right up there with astronaut and professional dog walker on one of those  career proclivity assessments. Didn’t mention president, thank goodness. We’d suspect pizza delivery guy might have ranked had he thought of it. He did become a dog walker, in fact. More recently and currently a high school english teacher. And now an author, published by HarperTeen. Not bad! Did we mention there will be pizza? Gordon has lived in the neighborhood with his wife & kids for a good long time, so we imagine he has a take on where to find good ones. Here are a couple of reviews: After getting stoned and causing a ruckus at a school assembly, Lawrence Barry avoids expulsion by cutting a deal with his guidance counselor to mentor Spencer, a Norwegian freshman transfer student. Up…
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Bassist Aaron Cohn brings together an exciting quartet featuring Henry Hung on trumpet Danny Brown on tenor sax Andre Sumelius on drums jazz as it’s played in San Francisco in 2016Â by its finest practitioners!
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SUPPORT BIRD & BECKETT - DONATE TODAY!
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.
Due to lapses in tax filings during and post-pandemic, the BBCLP's status as a registered nonprofit was suspended at the beginning of April 2024 while we reapply, which is expected to take about six months. Donations made after April 1st will not be tax-deductible until nonprofit status is restored.
However, we continue to present a full slate of programming live music and poetry, and producing literary chapbooks, and we seek and welcome your continued financial support in the interim. If a tax-deduction is not a major reason for your support to date, we hope you'll continue to ride with us while we navigate these next several months.
Click on "donate" in the navigation bar above, drop off a check at the bookshop, or drop one in the mail to:
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
