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!
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…
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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,…
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Note the 3pm to 5pm time for this gig! The Warriors are taking the NBA by storm, and we recognize that many of you want to be glued to this game! Fear not! Â No reason to miss blues saxophone powerhouse Nancy Wright & her trio, with Lorenzo Farrell on organ and Jay Hansen on drums. We’ve shifted the time up a bit for our Sunday “which way west?” session, so that you can indeed have it all! Jazz & basketball: will wonders never cease? With 30 years in the business, Nancy Wright has performed with B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, Elvin Bishop, Lonnie Mack, Commander Cody, Joe Louis Walker and Katie Webster. Â She’s been on innumerable recordings, not the least of which was BB’s Grammy-winning 33rd studio album released in 1993, “Blues Summit.” Â On that lp, BB joined one blues great after another and it was Nancy’s good fortune…
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Pianist Grant Levin enlists master reed player Noel Jewkes, bassist Kash Killion and drummer Mark Lee for three sets of small combo work. Each of these players is a seasoned pro with a stellar reputation in the Bay Area. All welcome!  $10 cover charge; $7 for members of “jazz club!” ($75 annual dues).
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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 June, Jimmy’s band features Stu Pilorz, trombone Joe Cohen, tenor sax Don Alberts, piano Bishu Chatterjee, bass Jimmy Ryan, drums Jimmy 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 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 and sometimes a sextet, comprising two to three horn players on the front…
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San Francisco Book Launch and Reading! Sons Of Noir: Murder and Mayhem by San Francisco North Bay Writers, edited by Ed Coletti and David Madgalene Contributors: David Beckman, Gary Brandt, Ed Coletti, David Madgalene, Pat Nolan, Jonah Raskin and Waights Taylor, Jr. Publisher: Round Barn Press, Santa Rosa, CA (June 7, 2015)
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This week, Smith shares the front line with fellow tenor player Raffi Garabedian (once a Bay Area player who’s been plying his trade in NYC for a good stretch) with bassist Noah Schenker and drummer Jon Arkin providing the foundation, the pulse and much fine filigree.
Read MoreDan Liberthson crafts poems from his thoughts on family, animals, baseball… all the things that tease his curious mind.  A storyteller as well as a wordsmith, his belief in the power and utility of narrative and language never flags.  He has several collections to his name, the latest being Morning, and Begin Again (self-published, 2012). David Hallstrom, probably the first poet to recite one of his poems to us across the counter at “the old bookstore” — the location down on Diamond Street which we opened up in May of 1999 — wrote of the moon, love, wine, the classic subjects of the poet. We’ve still got Dan in our midst, and he’ll deliver some new poems and perhaps a few old ones.  David, we lost a few years ago, and several of his old friends will read from manuscript pages that his old friend Joe Morosco has held onto. Jerry…
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It may be windy and foggy and cold outside, but the calendar still says May — and that means Spring. For twenty years now, Sherri has curated an intriguing set list of tunes befitting everyone’s favorite season — swinging from the familiar to the obscure, from Clifford Brown and Tad Dameron to Rodgers and Hammerstein, Johnny Mercer and Blossom Dearie’s favorite, Bob Haymes. Oh, “They Say It’s Spring” — and with Sherri’s sweet turn of a melody and deft mining of a lyric, by the time you saunter out the door onto blustery Chenery Street, you’ll be singing of robins, daffodils and sunshine — freezing temperatures be damned! The season isn’t over ’til Sherri’s sung.  This will be a date to revel in. David Udolf handles the piano chores, if you can call ’em that… though there’s nothing chorish about ’em, and nothing churlish about David’s playing.  Chris Amberger on…
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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.
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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!
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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
