Alto player Terrance Tony, until his untimely death of pneumonia on April 7th, led our fourth Saturday jazz club dates with fire coming from deep experience in the music. He came of age as a musician in Dallas and Houston, spending precious time on the bandstand learning his trade from such legendary Texas tenor players as Illinois Jacquet and Arnett Cobb. Terrance later toured with Art Blakey, an indication of the levels his study of jazz elevated him to.  Read a bit more here at an earlier post on our site. Drummer Vinnie Rodriguez, who anchored Terrance’s Saturday night quartets here at Bird & Beckett since last September, has assembled a quintet featuring alto player Jesse Levit to pay tribute to Terrance on what would have been Terrance’s gig, Saturday, April 25th from 8-11 pm. They’ll burn through some of the tunes that Terrance could be relied on to call…

Dave is at the core of the city we love. One of the  many reasons there’s still hope for this city.* Come hear his freewheeling rap, his deep grooving philosophy of love and peace. Don’t panic, it’s organic.   Learn to love, love to learn, never ends. * (Thanks David Blasevich for that catchphrase, used to describe a man who’s a font of cosmically meaningful catchphrases.)  

Mark Levine wrote the book on jazz piano… specifically, The Jazz Piano Book (Sher Music, 2005 — but originally published in 1989), and has been instrumental in the education of many thousands of  jazz pianists… He himself studied in Boston and New York with legendary figures Hal Overton, Herb Pomeroy and Jaki Byard. Along the way, Mark has shared the bandstand and recording studio with, among others, Woody Shaw, Bobby Hutcherson, Freddie Hubbard, Wallace Roney, Tito Puente, Milt Jackson, James Moody, Art Farmer, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Fortune, Eddie Harris, Stefon Harris, Eddie Henderson, Conrad Herwig, Clark Terry, Ingrid Jensen, Charlie Rouse, Bobby Watson, Chet Baker, Philip Harper, Mark Murphy, Art Pepper, Julian Priester, Bobby Shew, Steve Turre, Madeline Eastman, Enrique Pla and Poncho Sanchez… with particularly fruitful and intense extended stints with trumpeter Blue Mitchell and sax giants Joe Henderson, Harold Land and Dave Liebman, and with with latin jazz…

Two Laureates on one stage… and you in the open mic… Mike Tuggle, Sonoma County Poet Laureate Emeritus (2008-9), is celebrating the upcoming publication of The Motioning In, New & Selected Poems by Petaluma River Press due this spring.  He is also the author of Absolute Elsewhere (2004, Philos Press) & The Singing Itself (2009, Running Wolf Press) & two chapbooks, Cazadero Poems (1994, Floating Island Press), and What Lures The Foxes (2011, Kelly’s Cove Press).  He was the recipient of a Sonoma Community Foundation Award in poetry, a Dickens Award in fiction, and the Oberon Poetry Prize. Bill Vartnaw, Sonoma County Poet Laureate Emeritus (2012-3), is a veteran of the San Francisco poetry open mic scene; he established Taurean Horn Press in 1974, which has published the works of several SF poets.  He is the author of two poetry books, In Concern: for Angels (1984, Taurean Horn Press) & Suburbs of my…

Eugene Pliner, piano Adam Gay, bass Omar Aran, drums A classic piano trio, led by one of the key players on the local scene for decades, often heard at Les Joulins Jazz Bistro. Eugene began his musical career at an early age in Riga, Latvia (formerly Russia). In his early twenties, he migrated to the U.S. where he continued to study piano at the new England Conservatory in Boston under the direction of Ron Blake. He also studied with Andy LaVerne and Richie Bierach in New York. Eugene’s first professional gigs were with the multi-instrumentalist, Ira Sullivan, and Gary Campbell (tenor sax), professor at the University of Miami in Florida. He has recorded in Paris with Stephen McCraven, the prominent drummer in the Archie Shepp band. Eugene’s most recent recording project was called “Memoire d’Antibes,” featuring a program of original compositions.

Smith Dobson, tenor sax     and vibraphone Luke Westbrook, guitar Noah Schenker, bass Hamir Atwal, drums Smith Dobson debuts a new quartet to explore some of his own writing and aspects of the jazz canon that inform his sensibility. Without doubt, Smith is one of the key players on the San Francisco jazz scene — holding forth at Bird & Beckett every first Saturday of the month.