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!
Try ours!  Anywhere from a half dozen to a dozen people show up once a month (two of them have been coming for more than 15 years! while others come and go) to discuss a wide range of books — from lightweight confections to serious fiction, issue oriented stuff, historical tomes, popular culture, the gamut… The group now meets on the second Thursday of each month. August 14th, the book is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s much acclaimed Americanah, a novel riding high on the best seller lists. For the September 11th meeting, the group will discuss British author Rose Macaulay’s classic romp, The Towers of Trebizond, published in 1956. Much deference is given to new members in selecting something for the group to read.  Usually, the group has two months’ reading lined up at any given time.  At each meeting, they kick around what they might be interested in discussing a couple of…
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Author Sandra Hunter presents her debut novel, Losing Touch.  Joined by three colleagues:  poets Garrett Groenveld and Gary Turchin and essayist Barbara Yoder. After Indian Independence Arjun brings his family to London, but hopes of a better life rapidly dissipate. His wife Sunila spends all day longing for a nice tea service, his son suddenly hates anything Indian, and his daughter, well, that’s a whole other problem. As he struggles to enforce the values he grew up with, his family eagerly embraces the new. But when Arjun’s right leg suddenly fails him, his sense of imbalance is more than external. Diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, he is forced to question his youthful impatience and careless cruelty to his family, until he learns, ultimately, to love them despite — or because of — their flaws. In a series of tender and touching glimpses into the shared life of a married couple, Sandra Hunter…
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This week, saxophone legend Noel Jewkes joins –Grant Levin, piano –Mark Lee, drums — tba, bass for 3 sets of soulful, swinging jazz and bebop Grant Levin, jazz pianist ne plus ultra, produces our jazz club 2nd Saturday sessions.  Each outing, you can expect a group comprising some of the Bay Area’s finest jazz musicians, percolated through the sensibilities of one of its very finest young jazz pianists. $10 cover charge tonight for Noel Jewkes and the Grant Levin Trio. Besides being a jazz club, this is a jazz club — join jazz club for $75 per year, and your cover charge is just $7. Jazz Club features the Bay Area’s top jazz talent, and happens at Bird & Beckett every Saturday starting with our August 9th show.  August 16th will be film screening of a new documentary film on free jazz guitarist Sangeeta Michael Berardi.  Note: 7:30 start time.  No cover…
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Emerging poet Robbie Sugg will be joined by John Landry and Marina Lazzara for a celebratory reading on the occasion of the release of Robbie’s first collection of poems. Koccha, (Days Eye Press, 2014) is titled after the Miwok word for “house” or “shelter”.  It is a stunning gathering of California-inspired poems addressing the relationships between people and the land from which they live. Robbie studied painting, printmaking, papermaking, and Japanese language at San José State University, and his artwork has appeared in galleries throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as in New Bedford, Massachusetts, New York City, and Worcester, England. He plays the guzheng, a 22-stringed ancient Chinese zither. Presently, he lives with one foot on the Big Island of Hawai‘i and the other on the shores of San Francisco Bay.  Marina Lazzara was raised in Easton, Pennsylvania where the Lehigh River falls into the Delaware. She…
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Betty Shaw, piano Bob Kenmatsu, sax Robb Fisher, bass Ron Marabuto, drums. Betty Shaw’s love & deep understanding of jazz has led her to play anywhere, anytime, with top flight collaborators – with a commitment born of nothing so much as pure joy in the music. She first learned the piano as a depression-era kid, born in Albuquerque and raised through the teen years around Denver, lucky to have a piano to play on. Eventually, the family moved to the L.A. area, and once she reached adulthood, the need to make a living took her away from the music for what seemed to her a very long stretch. But in her 30s, Betty was already gravitating back to the piano, and to jazz, in a big way– enamored of Bill Evans & taking every opportunity to hear him at Shelly’s Manne Hole and wherever she could, digging also pianist Tommy…
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Sherri Roberts sings jazz and unusual standards, backed by a superlative trio led by pianist David Udolf, with Chris Amberger on bass and Jim Zimmerman on drums. A jazz-oriented singer with a warm, inviting voice, Sherri has established herself as a “less-is-more” vocalist in the gently swinging style of Chet Baker, Helen Merrill, or Julie London.  Her favored repertoire leans heavily towards wrongfully neglected standards, which she imbues with “flourish- free readings that are pure, strong, and potent.” (Christopher Loudon, JazzTimes, 2013). She has recorded for Brownstone, starting with 1994’s Twilight World and Dreamsville in 1997.  In 2006 Sherri released The Sky Could Send You followed in 2013 by Lovely Days, both on the Blue House/Pacific Coast Jazz label. Phil Woods, Chris Potter, Lew Soloff, Mark Soskin and Danny Gottlieb are among the supporting artists represented on these recordings. She has forged a creative partnership with bassist Harvie S, who played…
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Bassist Don Prell is the epitome of West Coast jazz… learning the trade in L.A. in the early 1950s and performing for years as a core member of saxophonist Bud Shank’s quartet.  Along with pianist Claude Williamson and drummer Chuck Flores, the Quartet recorded two albums for wide commercial release by Pacific Jazz: The Bud Shank Quartet Featuring Claude Williamson from 1956, and Bud Shank Plays Tenor from 1957.  Of the first album, allaboutjazz.com notes that “‘Bag of Blues’ … has a memorable melody over a set of chord changes that provides Shank and Williamson with a platform for all sorts of appealing lines. Shank…switches to flute for a haunting rendition of “Nature Boy”—slow and melancholy. Many saxophonists doubled on flute, but none seemed as dedicated as Shank to exploring the tonal possibilities available with the extra instrument… “Walkin’” pulls a more recent tune from the East Coast and is nothing…
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Featured poets plus an open mic twice a month at Bird & Beckett — on the 1st and 3rd Monday of each month.  Jerry Ferraz hosts.  All welcome to read in the open mic.  Tonight’s featured poet, Steve Carolan, is a North Beach denizen, appreciated particularly for his way with the prose poem. (Note that the previously scheduled reading by Marc Kokinos will be rescheduled for a date near the end of the year, when  his work schedule allows.)
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Rudi Wongozi’s East Bay roots are strong, pulling him back every now and again from NYC to be with family and perform a few dates.  We’re pleased to present him in the company of poet Paula Hackett and two fine rhythm players, Ollen Erich Hunt on bass and Leon Joyce on drums. Here’s a bit from a recent post on Rudi’s facebook page:  “The first two weeks of July I will be just chilling out with my mom (helping her celebrate her 90th birthday) my kids and grand kids…Then returning to New York to play the “Smooth Sounds By The Sea” event for Black Family Day on Staten Island on July 20th…Then back to The Bay for two shows…the first as I’ve mentioned for east bay friends at The Oakland Public Conservatory Thursday July 24th (1616 Franklin St. in Oakland)…and the second for SF friends at Bird and Beckett…
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An afternoon reading of four writers experimenting in various unique ways with prose and story. Readers:  Karen Lillis  Margarita Meklina  Lauren Traetto  Olga Zilberbourg Karen Lillis writes fiction, poetry, and genres inbetween. She is the author of four short novels, most recently Watch the Doors as They Close (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012). Her writing has appeared in Evergreen Review, Everyday Genius, Free State Review, New York Nights, Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology, Sensitive Skin Magazine, Trip City, and many more. 2014 publications include a poetry chapbook, The Paul Simon Project (Night Ballet Press) and a selection in Wreckage of Reason Two: An Anthology of Contemporary Xxperimental Women Writers (Spuyten Duyvil). Currently based in Pittsburgh, she blogs at Karen the Small Press Librarian and runs Small Press Roulette, an indie press bookselling service. Lillis recently received an Acker Award for Avant Garde Excellence in Fiction. Margarita Meklina is…
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Michael Parsons, piano Rob Figliuzzi, guitar Heshima, bass Vinnie Rodriguez, drums San Francisco is a jazz town, and you’re in it! Â Get down to Bird & Beckett and find out. Guest guitarist Rob Figliuzzi leads one of the finest trad sessions in town down at the hot little spot called “Local Edition” in the Hearst Building, where every Wednesday you can hear his eight piece band that includes Michael on piano, Harvey Robb on tenor and other fine local players. Â Tonight, Rob will make the swing to bop with Michael’s quartet, and cover a lot of territory en route. 2nd & 4th Saturdays at Bird & Beckett — The Jazz Philanthropists Union presents jazz club! Â $15 cover charge. Â Top flight local musicians.
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Chuck’s not here this week… but valve trombonist Frank Phipps sits in, while drummer Jim Zimmerman sits in for Tony Johnson and bassist Al Obidinsky sits in for Dean Reilly, with reedman Howie Dudune and guitarist Glen Deardorff as the core of the band. Five seasoned pros doing what they love to do — swing hard and sweet, and bop! Â Jim Zimmerman got his career in jazz and pop music fully on track back in the 1960s when he was staff drummer and percussionist for the Circle Star Theater down in San Carlos, laying down the rhythm for countless traveling stars that drew throngs to that venue — from Tony Bennett to the Temptations, Sinatra to the Jackson Five. Â He left the Circle Star to join Vince Guaraldi, recording on several of the Charlie Brown specials Before long, he was picked up by British jazz singer Cleo Laine and…
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Born in a Dublin tenement in the mid-20th century and for the past three decades a well loved figure in San Francisco’s North Beach bohemia, Renee is widely known for the long-running column she wrote for the Irish Herald called “The Rambling Road.â€Â And a rambling road she’s certainly traveled since escaping Dublin for Paris at age 17, with the help of a Hollywood actor and a kind stranger. Somewhere along the way, she met and fell in love with a radical longshoreman aboard a ship traveling through the Panama bound for Egypt with her year-old daugher, Ashling. He became her husband and San Francisco became her base, but she has never stopped wandering the world, and has never lost her “longing for elsewhere.† At the same time, she’s had a life-long commitment to peace activism and has lent her singing and acting abilities to causes too numerous to…
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Twice a month, on the 1st and 3rd Monday of each month, San Francisco troubadour Jerry Ferraz welcomes poets into Bird & Beckett. Â One or two featured readers, followed by an open mic. Tonight, Steve Arntson and Sharon Pretti are the features. We don’t have much biographical detail on Steve, but he’s perceived here at Bird & Beckett as having been an important element in the North Beach poetry scene for more than a couple of decades. Â We’ve heard him perform more than a few impressive, far reaching poems from the Bird & Beckett stage, and have heard him play some lovely classical numbers on the store piano– so we’re looking forward to hearing him perform at length, both poems and music. Â It appears he was born in Massachusetts and received his B.A. at the University of Washington, having moved to Seattle with his family at a young age. Â Later,…
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Flautist John Calloway is a key Bay Area jazz musician — with a national reputation.  Known best for his latin jazz work, he’s also a consummate straight ahead player, and an educator of the top rank.  For the past several years, he was also a member of the San Francisco Arts Commission, hence the sobriquet, the “Jazz Commissioner!”  Those political-cultural responsibilities have subsided, so he can now once again dig deep into the music that is his raison d’etre.  We’re always overjoyed when John can fit one of our Friday gigs into his schedule — tonight, Scott Foster has to be out of town, so John is our man!  He always brings along musicians that will surprise and delight.  Don’t miss this one!
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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
