Friday, 12/29 – 6-8pm: The Duncan James Quartet with Duncan on guitar, Larry Chinn on piano, Joe McKinley on bass and Bob Blankenship on drums, $20 suggested, pay what you can. Friday, 12/29 – 8:30-10pm: The Isaiah Javier Quartet with Isaiah on saxophone, Simon Aks on guitar, Giulio Cetto on bass and Lewis Sweatt on drums, $20 cover charge (cash or venmo). Saturday, 12/30 – 7:30-9:30pm: Cuarteto de la Luna Nueva with Gaea Schell on piano, Dan Neville on vibes, Saul Sierra on bass and Carlos Caro on percussion, $20 cover charge (cash or venmo). In general at B&B, you’ll be good if  you byob and a twenty to help pay the musicians! Kids under twelve are free and welcome, and teens & music students can take in a show for five or ten bucks. We’re open regular store hours this week and next — selling books noon to six…

Long-time collaborators Beth Custer and Will Bernard have a new recording — “SKY” — to present. Beth is an incredible artist. Read just a few posts on her website www.bethcuster.com and you’ll be floored by her energy, commitment and engagement in the creative life. Hear her music and you’ll be floored by her talent. Hear her live tonight at Bird & Beckett with the great Will Bernard — her long-time collaborator ever since the early 1980s days of the Club Foot Orchestra — together with the Oakland Symphony’s Ellen Gronningen, and carry that spirit through the holidays. World peace now! The trio performs music from SKY and a few deftly sculpted winter baubles. Gorgeous melodies, a little raunchy blues, some delicate otherworldly timbres, this lush trio will delight you with their genre-bending music. Beth Custer, clarinet Will Bernard, guitar Ellen Gronningen, violin $25 cover charge at the door. Reservations: 415-586-3733…

The legacy band continues! 21 years and counting we’ve had Friday jazz after work in the bookshop. It’s too late to stop now! Charlie McCarthy, saxophones and flute Max Perkoff, piano Chuck Metcalf, bass Tony Johnson, drums From swing to bop, jazz is the thing! Byob and a twenty for the band! Kids under 12 free Teens and music students, $5-10 will do it.

December 17th is the night that dervishes around the world whirl, each in their own place, celebrating the passage of the great wise man Rumi into the unseen realms. They celebrate the gift of his life and thought, which still inspires now, even after seven hundred and fifty years. Rumi’s rapturous turns of phrase, carried across into so many languages, are only one facet of his gem-like mind. His literary works are full of themes and settings which reveal a much more common world than we might otherwise presume, given such a mystifying reputation. The enraptured one could actually be any one of us, but we might not know it, having become habituated to not seeing it. Rumi’s thoughts challenge us every bit as much as they succor us. You might even say that their challenge is simply a facet of the inspirational jewel which is Rumi’s live-giving gift. Tonight,…

The Vince Lateano Trio has a long-standing monthly residency on the third Sunday of each month, from 5-7pm. Vince has been a mainstay of the San Francisco jazz scene since the mid-1960s. No better way to spend a late Sunday afternoon! Do come, byob and a twenty for the band, or whatever you can afford. Bring kids, neighbors, friends, and introduce them to the joys of jazz at Bird & Beckett! Can’t make this one in the flurry of holiday excitement? Come the day after Christmas at 3pm for a relaxed reprise of the trio! Ben Stolorow, piano Peter Barshay, bass Vince Lateano, drums

BYOB and a twenty for the band– and a penchant for a good time. Bring friends, neighbors, kids, parents, parrots, whatever ya got. Unwind at the end of the thing we used to call the “work week” by settling into the cozy confines of your neighborhood bookshop, and enjoy jazz & good company with a bunch of fine San Francisco jazz players. It’s a twenty-one year tradition at Bird & Beckett! The 2nd Friday of every month, we have the pleasure of presenting the potentate of piano, the sultan of swing, the duke of ten digits, Mr. Easifingers himself, Eric Shifrin at the piano in the company of one batch or another of his closest friends and colleagues. Tonight, that means guitarist Gino Raugi and bassist Michael Leal Price. It’s a happy two-hour happy hour in store for you. Snag someone you love and drag ’em in here for a…

Book release reading & celebration!   Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein)’s new volume of poems God in Her Ruffled Dress (What Books Press, 10/23) appears 34 years after publication of her debut full-length poetry book The Transparent Body (Wesleyan University Press).  Her poems have appeared in more than 60 anthologies and periodicals, including City Lights Review, Field, Kenyon Review, Lilith, Ploughshares, Poetry International, Tikkun, and Zyzzyva. She has won creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, and others. Lisa B is also a jazz and groove singer interweaving spoken and sung verse in her original songs and re-envisioned standards. She has released seven albums and various singles (available on all music platforms) to critical acclaim and international radio play, and she performs with her band throughout the country. She also works as a professional psychic reader.  Thoreau Lovell is a poet…

Poets Sarah Menefee and Patrick Dunagan read tonight to celebrate the release of “There You Are,” Sarah’s chapbook just published by Bird & Beckett. An accomplished poet with deep roots in the San Francisco tradition of political activism, Sarah is a homeless rights activist, a founding member of Homes Not Jails and First they came for the homeless, a tent-community based, homeless-led homeless rights organization which organizes street actions to demand housing and defy criminalization. She is also a founding member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America and the Revolutionary Poets Brigade, and serves on the Editorial Board of the People’s Tribune, where she edits the homeless movement pages. Patrick James Dunagan is a poet and essayist, raised a skateboarder in Southern California who became interested in poetry as a transplanted teenager living in New Hampshire, refining his reading skills in the course of earning a BA…

We’re always pleased when we can  host the talented youth who are enrolled in the Roots, Jazz and American Music undergraduate degree program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Tonight, it’s their end of the semester holiday party. Food, drink and music!

John Calloway has been very busy with his project delving into the intersection between his Filipino and African American roots, particularly the juncture when his grandfather as one of the Buffalo Soldiers deployed to the Philippines.  Tonight, he’ll range freely over the musical territory that he’s built a career on. $20 cover charge. BYOB. Reservations, call 415-586-3733.

REOTREO PLUS ONE Donald Robinson, drums Karl Evangelista, guitar Larry Ochs, reeds plus Kazuto Sato, bass Robinson, Evangelista and Ochs tonight invite the inspiring bassist and long-time Jazzman Kazuto Sato to join their free-jazz band. REOTREO has its roots in the three and a half decades-long association of percussionist Robinson and reed player Ochs, who have collaborated in free and structured improvisation in a duo format privately and publicly since the early 1990s, when they first began working together in saxophonist Glenn Spearman’s Double Trio. The Double Trio released three lps between 1993 and 1996. In 1994, the two colleagues joined with bassist Lisle Ellis in the trio What We Live, which released seven lps between 1994 and 2002. In 1997, Robinson joined with Ochs’ long-standing (since 1977) band, ROVA Saxophone Quartet to record their revivication of John Coltrane’s Ascension. From 2000 to 2010, Ochs and Robinson joined with Scott Amendola…

The trio returns! Luis Peralta, piano David Ewell, bass Ben Esposito, drums Danielle Perez, vocals $20 cover charge (cash or venmo at the door) byob Supported by Jazz in the Neighborhood’s Guaranteed Fair Wage Fund, and you!

Celebrating Scott’s nine-month tenure with saxophonist David Boyce and percussionist Zori Marinova at Etcetera wine bar on Valencia Street, the trio will entertain you at Bird & Beckett as this month’s installment in Scott’s regular third-Fridays residency at Bird & Beckett. Bringing musical wine & roses to you, his adoring fans. Bring your own actual wine, or a beverage of your choosing, and raise a glass to San Francisco’s wealth of fine jazz players. $20 suggested donation; kids under 12 free, teens and music students pay a $5-10 sliding scale.

  Jesse Levit, saxophone Kai Lyons, guitar Billy Edwards, bass Elé Howell, drums $20 cash cover charge or Venmo: @birdandbeckett byob   Elé Howell, a prodigy from a young age born and raised in the Bay Area, names a set of early influences that include his father, the saxophonist Richard Howell, as well as teachers and mentors from the Oaktown Jazz Workshops and Bay Area jazz and African music communities, including Art Khu, Babatunde Lea, E.W. Wainwright, Khalil Shaheed, Larry Vann, James Henry, Jack Dorsey, Sly Randolph and Angela Wellman. Still in his mid-twenties and now based in New York, he’s forged a vital career, touring internationally with Ravi Coltrane and Chief Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, and working along the way with Stanley Clarke, John Scofield, Gill Goldstein, Brandee Younger, Reggie Workman, John Santos, David Gilmore, Weedie Braimah, Mike Rodriguez, Jeff Chambers, Alex Sipiagan and countless other fantastic musicians. “He’s…