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!
Instrumental surf guitar and so much more! Â Listen, dance, groove, do what you want — we guarantee a good time at our new monthly series. Â Noon to 1:30 every second Sunday… the Surf-a-billy Swing Time Dance Party! Our December show: The Lee Vilensky Trio Guitarist Lee Vilensky, Bill MacBeath (bass) and Jamie Lease (drums) have been laying down an exquisite and rocking instrumental sound for years with this trio, rising from the ashes of The Swingin’ Johnsons. Â Lee hails from Long Island & New Jersey, and has put in serious time with Pearl Harbour and the Explosions, Thee Hellhounds and other favorites. Â Jamie has played with the likes of The Dils, Queen Ida and Her Bon Temps Zydeco Band, the PBR Street Gang, Norton Buffalo, while Bill’s affiliations have included Alvin Youngblood Hart’s band as well as Carlos Guitarlos… Their new album is Destination: Love — a fabulous follow up…
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Tonight, pianist Grant Levin changes it up, presenting saxophonist Jonathan Bautista, bassist Ricardo Diaz, and drummer Jon Arkin. Grant has been knocking us out for a couple of years now, latecomers as we are to the party that started rocking when he drifted down from UNLV, or was it Reno… falling in with some of the Bay Area’s best, most experienced hands, and quickly dazzling audiences with his fluidity, his harmonic nuances, his sheer joy at the keyboard. Â He’s a young cat, but his playing belies his years– trust us on that. Grant runs the show on the second Saturday of each month. Â If you haven’t heard him, you’ll kick yourself for not hearing him sooner. Â Now’s the time. Â Get down to jazz club and put yourself in Grant’s capable hands.
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On the second Friday of each month, jazz in the bookshop features The Jimmy Ryan Quintet aka The Bird & Beckett Bebop Band! In December, Jimmy’s band features Henry Hung on trumpet and Stu Pilorz on trombone, with Don Alberts on piano, Bishu Chatterjee on bass and Jimmy himself on drums!!! Drummer Ryan learned his trade in L.A. in the ’50s, and hit the San Francisco scene (by way of a short stint in Monterey) in 1960.  Jimmy has played alongside influential musicians Putter Smith, Vince Wallace, Kent Glenn and Bishop Norman Williams, putting in significant time in the early days at legendary San Francisco clubs including Jimbo’s Bop City, Ronnie’s Soulville and in the Fillmore and the Jazz Workshop in North Beach, and in a more recent era, the Gathering Caffe on Grant Avenue. Jimmy’s regular band at Bird & Beckett on the 2nd Fridays is typically a quintet that includes two horn players — Henry Hung, trumpet; Stu Pilorz,…
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Darlene Langston fronts a great septet playing the music of New Orleans when jazz was young. Â Andrew Storar, trumpet; John Hunt, trombone; Don Neely, clarinet; Duncan James, guitar; Alan Steger, piano; Al Obidinski, bass and Greg Gotelli, drums.
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Vocalist Gail Dobson has just released a deeply beautiful new 6-song EP called “How Fragile We Are” and will launch it here with terrific musicians who participated in the recording — Masaru Koga on sax, percussion and shakuhachi, guitarist Luke Westbrook and drummer Alan Hall, joined by bassist Peter Barshay.
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Join editor Todd Swindell, Neeli Cherkovski and Jim Nawrocki for a reading from the new volume of Harold Norse’s selected poems, I Am Going to Fly Through Glass, freshly published by Talisman House. Â Each knew Norse personally and can shed light on the life and the work of this major poet, born in Brooklyn in 1916 and resident in San Francisco, in the Mission District, from 1972 until his death in 2009. Allen Ginsberg met Harold Norse on the streets of Greenwich Village in 1944, both men embarking on a life of letters, reshaping what America knew of poetry and giving birth and shape to a new literary generation. Â Ginsberg was 18, but Harold was 28, steeped in the classics, boasting a close association with W. H. Auden and proclaiming the influence of William Carlos Williams. Â Norse became renowned for his embrace of a vernacular approach that would characterize the…
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Emily Wolahan explores the interstitial space between words and between people. She notes, “The electrical charge of an encounter—with another or with oneself—creeps into and charges my work. I like to explore the action of thinking and the action of looking.” “Every part of your day will be ………………this part of your day.” An open mic follows. Jerry Ferraz, m.c. visit www.emilywolahan.com Hinge BY EMILY WOLAHAN (forthcoming from National Poetry Review Press, 2014) Hinge is a book fixated on contingency and what it might mean to live in it. These meditative lyrics are radically, at times painfully aware that anything could happen, that “The only guarantee is the world / in transition.†This awareness walks hand in hand with Wolahan’s almost preternatural sensitivity to cause and effect, the syntax of the physical and the interplay of the parts that make up any given whole. More than any younger poet I…
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Pianist Walter Earl improvises effortlessly and fluidly, drawing on great reserves of emotion and experience. He’s played jazz for decades as well as doing a lot of work on film scores and the like. Â We’ve heard him here solo and working with poets, and now look forward to this trio date covering jazz standards and original material.
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Walker Talks! Â The last Sunday of each month… This month, Walker Brents III ponders an enigmatic 16th century seer, a doctor in a time of plagues and cataclysms whose uncanny ruminations and oblique, dire prophecies of the future have dazzled and intrigued generations. Nostradamus was a learned and intuitive scholar, a renaissance humanist, a symbolist poet whose grasp of his own time and its possible futures reveal much about the extra-rational underpinnings of our own time of supposed right and reason.
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Four colleagues — jazz professionals for six decade, if not more. Charlie McCarthy, sax Ray Scott, guitar Chuck Bennett, bass Jim Zimmerman, drums. These musicians are all well-traveled, highly regarded players, and have been getting together on a weekly basis for years — when not traveling, that is….
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We’re closed for Thanksgiving day, but then we’re back in full swing with books for sale and live jazz Friday to Sunday, plus a poetry reading on Monday. Friday, November 28th – 5:30-8:00 pm: jazz in the bookshop! The Chuck Peterson Quintet, with Chuck and Howie Dudune on reeds, Duncan James on guitar, Dean Reilly on bass and Tony Johnson on drums. Saturday, November 29th – 8-11 pm: Â jazz club! Â Charlie McCarthy, reeds; Ray Scott, guitar; Chuck Bennett, bass and Jim Zimmerman, drums. Sunday, November 30th – 4:30-6:30 pm: which way west? The Walter Earl Trio Monday, December 1 – 7-9 pm: Â Poets! Emily Wolahan features, with an open mic to follow. Emily’s first poetry volume, HINGE, is due out by the end of the year through the National Poetry Review Press. Â Her poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast Journal, Omniverse, The The Poetry, Drunken Boat and…
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The “Keepers of the Flame” is a jazz coalition created by Dave Bendigkeit on trumpet and flugelhorn, featuring Dave Udolf on piano, Akira Tana on drums, and Chris Amberger on bass. They perform all original songs from the great river of American music where the groove and self-expression are paramount, as well as unique arrangements of the great jazz compositions and familiar songs from the American Songbook. Â Members have performed with everyone from Art Blakey, Cab Calloway, Shelly Manne and Ella Fitzgerald to Freddie Hubbard, Art Farmer, Sonny Stitt, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and so many other giants of this music.
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In her new book, Sapna Thottathil calls on us to rethink the politics of organic food by focusing on what it means for the people who grow and sell it–what it means for their health, the health of their environment, and also their economic and political well-being. Taking readers to the state of Kerala in southern India, she shows us a place where the so-called “Green Revolution” program of hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and rising pesticide use had failed to reduce hunger while it caused a cascade of economic, medical, and environmental problems. Farmers burdened with huge debts from buying the new seeds and chemicals were committing suicide in troubling numbers. Farm laborers suffered from pesticide poisoning and rising rates of birth defects. A sharp fall in biodiversity worried environmental activists, and everyone was anxious about declining yields of key export crops like black pepper and coffee. “A breath of…
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Alto player Terrance Tony assembles the band each 4th Saturday of the month, drawing on some of the stellar players around the Bay Area.  Tonight, pianist Grant Levin, bassist Aaron Cohn and drummer Vinnie Rodriguez are on the gig! Two years ago, Terrance came out from Houston – where he was born and raised – and immediately gained everyone’s attention with his fleet bebop chops.  “Houston’s a great place to be from,” he says.  We’re lucky to have him call Oakland home! But it was In Houston and Dallas where he became the musician he is today — under the direct influence and bandstand tutelage of some true giants, including Texas tenors Illinois Jacquet, Arnett Cobb, Don Wilkerson and Eddie “Cleanhead†Vinson and Dallas titans James Clay and Marchel Ivery. Terrance toured with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1989 in the stellar line up that included Benny Green, Donald Harrison, Javon Jackson and Frank Lacy, playing…
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Saxophonist David Boyce, pianist Ben Slater, bassist Adam Gay and drummer Dave Mihaly join leader/guitarist Scott Foster for a foray across the musical terrain of Thelonious Monk.
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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
