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!
Why are they called “Buena Vista?” Why, it’s just ’cause they look so damned good! And they play good too! Modeled on Eddie Condon’s band that held forth in New York in the 30s and 40s, the Buena Vista Jazz Band plays the original American chamber music, birthed by black musicians in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century– a musical tradition that traveled up the big muddy Mississippi to Chicago and flooded across the continent, sailed the seas, resonates still. Syncopated, intricate, freewheeling and joyful. Every year, we ask the Buena Vista Jazz Band back to Bird & Beckett to help us wish a happy birthday to Louis Armstrong, himself born at the turn of the 20th, whose birthday is traditionally celebrated on Independence Day. The Buena Vista Jazz Band features: Don Neely on clarinet John Hunt on trombone Noel Weidkamp on trumpet Si Perkoff on piano…
Read More
Two of the City’s premiere young saxophonists — Smith Dobson V and Downtown Danny Brown — go head to head at jazz club for the 4th of July — with bassist John Wiitala and drummer Tony Johnson stoking the fire. Scale the heights of San Francisco jazz as it’s played in 2015!
Read More
jazz in the bookshop every Friday, 5:30-8:00 pm Friday, July 3rd: Â SeaBop Trio Don Prell, bass –Â Scott Foster, guitar –Â Eugene Pliner, piano The 1st Friday of every month, Don Prell brings in an aggregation he calls The SeaBop Ensemble, kicking off another round of Fridays. Â The co-founders of Bird & Beckett’s long running jazz series follow suit: Â with Jimmy Ryan fielding a quintet or sextet on the second Fridays, Scott Foster taking the third for a fresh unit of his devising, and Chuck Peterson leading his 230 Jones Street quintet on the fourth. Bird & Beckett’s Friday jazz dates started in late 2002– and somewhere along the way trumpeter Ernie Figueroa, may he rest in peace, gave it its name. And on it goes!
Read More
Drummer Vinnie Rodriguez puts together a combo on the fourth Saturday of every month.  For his June date, he’s got Dan Magay on reeds; Neil Kelly on guitar; and Aaron Germain on bass.  Vinnie reports: “Neil’ s got a few original modern jazz tunes, plus Mingus, Kenny Kirkland, Sonny Rollins’ ‘The Bridge,’  hard stuff.” Born in Los Altos, reed player Dan Magay grew up surrounded by music, starting clarinet studies at 9 and adding saxophone at 10. During his high school years he studied clarinet with Don Carol (San Francisco Symphony), Bill Menkin, and Michael Corner; and saxophone with Mary Fettig, Mel Martin, Burt Corelli and Rory Snyder, moving on to USC as a music major from 1988 to 1990 before transferring to the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1991.  At Berklee, he studied privately with George Garzone, Bill Pierce, Joe Viola, Jerry Bergonzi, Hal Crook and continued studying classical clarinet…
Read More
Every Friday evening at Bird & Beckett, the neighborhood — and folks from foreign climes and Bay Area aeries — assemble “after work” to enjoy each other’s company and the work of some of the fine jazz musicians who call the Bay Area home. The tradition here started in late 2002, when tenor player Chuck Peterson told Bird & Beckett proprietor Eric Whittington that he’d give up jazz and take up golf if he couldn’t find a regular place to play with colleagues who shared his history in the music. Â Whittington took him at his word and offered him a weekly gig, Friday evenings — and Chuck made sure there were musicians who knew their art and called the tunes to keep the music flowing. Â Here we are 13 years on, and on it goes. Chuck’s fourth Fridays quintet features colleagues that started in the music with him back in…
Read MoreTod Thilleman, originally from Wisconsin, has been based in New York since the early 1980s, active in art and poetry there with a long list of associations, readings and exhibitions.  Throughout the 1990s, he was a co-editor of the journal “Poetry New York.”  He also produced a series of what he termed Strophaic transcriptions (strophaic being a term derived by combining the word mosaic with strophe), whose main poetic reality was generated from the “overheard†and the “overseen.†Also based in New York, Lewis Warsh has produced over thirty volumes of poetry, fiction and autobiography, including Alien Abduction (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), One Foot Out the Door: Collected Stories (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), A Place in the Sun (Spuyten Duyvil, 2010) and Inseparable: Poems 1995-2005 (Granary Books, 2008) and co-founded with Bernadette Mayer United Artists Magazine and Books. Toni Mirosevich lives in the Bay Area, teaching creative writing at San Francisco State…
Read More
Join us Wednesday, June 24th from 7 to 9pm for the opening reception of Holly Coley: Suggested Reading, featuring painting, ceramic sculpture, and a library curated by the artist. See more of her work at hollycoley.com Show runs through the end of July, open daily 11–7. Gallery Ex Libris is located deep in the back of the bookshop. galleryexlibris.com
Read More
Neeli Cherkovski’s newest volume of poetry, The Crow and I (R.L. Crow Publications, 2015) — following two works from the same publisher: Leaning Against Time (2004, PEN Award winner) and From the Canyon Outward (2009) — “again opens the window to the self as (Cherkovski) takes us deeper into his search for time, reason, redemption and love.” Joining Neeli for today’s reading will be honored guest Diane di Prima (San Francisco Poet Laureate Emerita) as well as the poets John Landry, Marina Lazzara and Jorge Argueta. Neeli Cherkovski grew up Neeli Cherry — the son of Clare, a social worker, and Sam Cherry, a bookseller and photographer, down in San Bernardino, California. Still in his mid-teens, he was brusquely introduced by his father to the great postman-poet Charles Bukowski and soon gravitated to the Southern California literary scene that centered in the sun-bleached sprawl of Los Angeles. With Bukowski, he co-edited the little literary…
Read More
Reedman Ralph Carney is pret’ near legendary, and plays around here and near and far with a multitude of projects. This one — EaR Candy Quartet — is constituted to test the proposition that “to steal from one artist is plagiarism but to steal from everybody is research.” Ralph goes on to say that EaR Candy digs “a little deeper to uncover hidden gems in the early repertoire of Duke Ellington, Red Allen, Jelly Roll Morton as well as diverse and more recent influences.” He’s joined at Bird & Beckett today by piano player Eric Shifrin, bassist John Clark and drummer Mark Lee to do a little musical spelunking along these lines. We’re ecstatic at the prospect and suspect you ought to be as well! Stir your stumps & come down to the store this Sunday afternoon to find out what Ralph & Co. have in store for you. There may be…
Read More
jazz club! when lights are low… Every Saturday night at Bird & Beckett Aaron Leese, piano & vocals, and Chris Lauf, drums, enlist trumpeter Dave Shaff, guitarist Scott Foster and bassist Kurt Ribak for three rocking sets of funky New Orleans style jazz and blues. If you like your musical gumbo with a kick, you’re going to have a good time with this band. Come early or come late, you’ll like what you hear.
Read More
Guitarist Scott Foster holds down the 3rd Fridays assignment in Bird & Beckett’s “jazz in the bookshop” series. Now well into its 13th year, this is truly a neighborhood jazz party par excellence. Tonight, Scott is bringing in a quartet with Art Khu on piano, Adam Gay on bass and Greg Wyser-Pratte on drums. Songs of summer joy & release! For each of his sessions, Scott can be counted on to assemble a band and a program that will make you smile, deepen your appreciation for the music and stretch your knowledge of its capabilities.
Read More
Here on a brief visit from Paris and Oslo, pianist Michael Parsons and drummer Ulf Bjorkbom, with sax player Danny Brown and bassist Noah Schenker — all familiar faces on the Bird & Beckett bandstand — return to Bird & Beckett! Besides celebrating Paris & Oslo & all that jazz, we’ll be celebrating the proprietor’s 59th birthday and the beginning of the store’s 17th year in Glen Park! And with any luck at all, we’ll also be toasting the success of our application for a “Limited Live Entertainment Permit.” Â (Our hearing before the Entertainment Commission takes place at City Hall on Bloomsday, June 16th.)
Read More
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed… –Come up, Kinch.  Come up, you fearful Jesuit… And thus is introduced young, intense Stephen Dedalus whose day unfolds in counterpoint to and occasionally overlapping that of ad salesman Leopold Bloom in 1904 Dublin — June 16th, to be precise — at the outset of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses.  Bloom himself is introduced in the second chapter, making his wife’s breakfast, feeding the cat some milk, stepping out to buy a pork kidney at the butcher’s to cook up back at home. Bloomsday celebrations have taken place all over the globe for decades– we’ve staged a few ourselves in our modest way, and we’re game to do it again. We figured the way we would do it this time would be to read bitsof the book, ten minutes a…
Read MoreRichard Anbian has been described as “a passionate virtuoso steeped in these times and deep with tradition,†according to Richard Hack, “[whose] poetry crackles with currency – hiply linguistic turns of natural originality, rhythmically brimming with a tempestuous taste of ecstasy, reason, and love.†Dusty Dog Reviews declared him “a genius or a Venusian.†Gerald Nicosia is a biographer (“Memory Babe”), cultural historian (“Home to War”) and literary critic as well as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter and poet. His new book of poems is “Night Train to Shanghai” (Grizzly Peak Press, 2014).  Click here to read a review of that volume in the Huffington Post.  As a freelance journalist, interviewer, and literary critic for the past three-plus decades, Gerry has contributed to hundreds of publications, including the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, the American Book Review, the Review of Contemporary Fiction,…
Read More
Sign Up for Our Weekly Emails!
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," continuing the work we began when the store was established in 1999.
We continue to present a full slate of programming of live music and poetry readings, and produce a literary journal and poetry chapbooks, and we seek and welcome your continued financial support by way of donations.
Click on "donate" in the navigation bar above. Better yet, make a check out to the “Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project” and drop it off or mail it 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.
____________
We're immensely appreciative of Jazz in the Neighborhood for having stepped in as our temporary fiscal sponsor for a few months, while we straightened out some paperwork to get nonprofit status restored to the BBCLP. We're happy to say that's been done, and all past, present, and future donations made directly to the BBCLP are fully tax-deductible!
TAKE OUR SURVEY
To take our SURVEY, click here, and help the BBCLP get to know you better! As Duke Ellington always said, we love you madly...
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
