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!
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But nothing beats being in the room with the music & the musicians!
“There is nothing more wonderful than the café, and the tales that are drawn from them.  Long live the café, whether found on the dark backstreet, the fashionable thoroughfare, or the pages of a book!  Within them, as through these tales, we gain entrance to the history of a world where madams rub shoulders with mystics and visionaries with vagabonds.” — from the introduction by Patti Smith. Tales from the Eternal Café, author Janet Hamill’s debut short story collection, offers a thrilling, unwinding trail of tales that excite and mystify, drift then deliver a powerful punch that readers will devour. Seventeen stories lure readers into a labyrinth of surprise and suspense, with humor lurking just on the other side of pathos, a tear just moments away from bright, well-deserved laughter. It is an unleashing of an incredible imagination through noir-like, neo-surrealistic tales of passion and mystery. As Katie Farris, author of boysgirls raves,…
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Wednesday, July 16th — 7 pm
The Ohlone Way
reissue celebration with
Malcolm Margolin and Vincent Medina
The Ohlone Way is a classic work that makes a wonderful effort to imagine and understand the indigenous people who inhabited these central California dunes, rocky outcroppings, redwood forests, chaparral, grasslands and river deltas for thousands of years before the European conquest.  Malcolm Margolin produced a work that remains fresh, a good aid to comprehending and honoring what has gone before and what, as it turns out, continues to and through this day. Research for The Ohlone Way began in 1974 and publication was in 1978.  In 2003, an afterword was added to reflect the author’s assessment of his effort.  Now, in 2014, a new preface reflects his desire to maintain a context for the book.  The book itself is reissued without changes. Malcolm Margolin will join us, together with Vincent Medina, to present this familiar and affecting work.  Margolin, through Heyday Press and the magazine News from Native California, has…
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Smith Dobson V, tenor sax Michael Coleman, piano Rob Adkins, bass Hamir Atwal, drums Smith Dobson V comes from a long line of jazz musicians, and carries it well– he’s very highly regarded for his work on vibes, drums and sax. Â He can be heard gigging around town and far afield at major venues on all three instruments. At age 15, Smith led a band at the Monterey Jazz Festival… four years after making his Festival debut at age 11. Â Just last year, he played the Festival again with his Lester Young project called “Prez Kids” and he’ll be taking the band back to the Festival in September 2014. Smith’s father was a hugely admired pianist, and his mother is a vocalist with a devoted following. Â His grandfather was a jazz accordionist and his grandmother a jazz vocalist. Â Sister Sasha is a jazz vocalist as well. As a child, Smith…
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This week, saxophone legend Noel Jewkes joins –Grant Levin, piano –Eugene Warren, bass –Mark Lee, drums 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. Cover charge for the evening is $15– unless you’re a student, a struggling artist or are just squeaking by in this economically supercharged region, in which case an $8-15 sliding scale is for you! 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 on the 2nd and 4th Saturday of each month.  In…
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Drummer Jimmy Ryan leads a top-notch aggregation of musicians: Tonight, vocalist Dorothy Lefkovits performs with the band. Stu Pilorz, trombone Stephen Norfleet, tenor sax Don Alberts, piano Aaron Cohn, bass join Jimmy for a swinging bebop date. Drummer Ryan 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 and 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.
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Tonight, we’ll celebrate with Owen Hill as he reads poems from his new collection. A Walk Among the Bogus (Lavendar Ink, 2014).  Fellow poet Patrick James Dunagan will open the evening with a few of his own. Owen Hill comes from a line of Left Coast noir writers who’ve skulked from Hollywood to San Francisco, unafraid to “walk among the bogus.† Like Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald, beneath the hard-boiled narrative of his novels (the great Chandler Apartments series) runs a precise indictment of corruption, money, and political power. Here is Hill’s poetry— the same no nonsense tone, voice full of gunpowder, ripping the cover off the industrial-entertainment complex. These flinty poems would do a union organizer proud.  – Andrew Schelling I love hearing the world (its broken beauty is born) through Owen Hill’s ears—his poems make a perfect fusion of song and epigram—they are wise and furious and always just ahead of…
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Nellie Wong’s four collections of poetry speak directly to labor issues. Her latest is “Breakfast Lunch Dinner” rooted in her formative experience working in her family’s restaurant in Oakland’s Chinatown. Alice E. Rogoff has published two collections of poetry. She will read from a new project, “The Labor Union Women on our Stairways” about women labor union organizers in San Francisco. An open mic follows the featured readers. Jerry Ferraz hosts.
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Each year for five years running, we’ve welcomed the Buena Vista Jazz Band to the Bird & Beckett stage on the Independence Day weekend (and the last Sunday before Christmas too!) — and so it goes! Singer Darlene Langston will front the seven-piece band, which features Noel Weidkamp (trumpet), Max Perkoff (trombone), Don Neely (clarinet and vocal), Duncan James (guitar), Si Perkoff (piano), Mike Kenny (bass) and Greg Gotelli (drums). The Buena Vista Jazz Band digs deep into the trad jazz songbook, celebrating the music born in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century. This was the music brought to full bloom by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, Jimmie Noone, Danny Barker, Jelly Roll Morton, Pops Foster, Baby Dodds and a rich honor roll of great musicianers — the storied practitioners of “America’s Classical Music”!
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Buried Unsung — Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre, Zeese Papanikolas’s meditation on the event 100 years ago, in 1914, that set off the Colorado Coalfields War.  The book takes as its focus this Greek immigrant miner who lost his life and whose memory would be lost to us but for the efforts of historian Papanikolas.  Notes historian James C. Foster in the American Historical Review, as Papanikolas “follows the peculiar Greek coffeehouse network across the West searching for a man identified by only a few lines and a fading photograph… (h)is search becomes as much a part of the story as Tikas himself…  When the book ends on a lonely back road in Crete, one can only mutter “This is why I became a historian.†A short video and a few poems will complement Papanikolas’s presentation.  This is the first of two Laborfest events at Bird & Beckett, to be…
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Don Prell’s Seabop Ensemble plays the first Friday of every month at Bird & Beckett. Â Don’s been handling the lion’s share of the bass duties here since the series started way back in late 2002, and he’s still going strong. Â He’s a veteran of the late 1950s Los Angeles based Bud Shank Quartet, and brings in a band that includes Jerry Logas on reeds, Michael Parsons on piano; and Vinnie Rodriguez on drums.
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Dave Tidball (clarinet, bass clarinet) Jim Dukey (clarinet, bass clarinet) Dick Mathias (clarinet, bass clarinet) Charlie Keagle (clarinet) A return engagement by a favorite aggregation! With this concert, the Albatross Clarinet Quartet will present an array of new music, most of it conceived and arranged within the last year. The pieces range from straight-ahead be-bop to poly-tonal funk, musical commentary on classical pieces from the late 19th century as well as some “free†improvisation. All are written by members of the quartet, as well as two offerings by Paul Potyen, a supremely gifted musician and an old friend. At length did cross an Albatross, Through the fog it came; As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God’s name. It ate the food it ne’er had eat, And round and round it flew. The ice did split with a thunder-fit; The helmsman steered us through! And a…
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Joel Forrester returns to San Francisco — and Bird & Beckett — to play a few dates around the Bay. Â Joel’s well known for his work with the Microscopic Sextet, for solo accompaniment to silent films, for composing the theme for “Fresh Air” on NPR, and for thousands more compositions which he’s spun out as if it were no trick at all! Â And then there’s that legendary 8 hour piece of his called “Industrial Arts”. He’s wonderfully droll, and he’s a wonderful piano player. Â Come enjoy a rare opportunity to spend an hour or two in his company!
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Stephen Kopel, Nancy Wakeman, Al Averbach and Jane Rades read their work. Â Open mic follows. Â Jerry Ferraz hosts. Come one, come all! & Happy Bloomsday to you!
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J. Tony Serra will present his new “chromatic, metaphoric autobiography” Tony Serra: The Green, Yellow and Purple Years in the Life of a Radical Lawyer (Grizzly Peak Press, 2014).  Written while in Federal prison for tax resistance, Tony goes into his defense of Black Panthers, S.L.A., New World Liberation Front, Nuestra Familia, Earth First, Hells Angels, Mafia and Native Americans, and his thoroughgoing anti-establishment ideology.  We suspect that Tony is one sincere & committed cat, and a wonderful raconteur to boot.  Our kinda guy! He may also delve a bit into Walking the Circle: Prison Chronicles as well as the Paulette Frankl’s Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of Tony Serra. For decades, Serra has been a champion of individuals prosecuted by the American legal system for speaking, acting and living in ways that the State and its enforcers deem dangerous to the public good– and to the continuation of the State. Serra recently took on the defense of…
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Join us this evening to hear from contributors to the new issue of Forum, the literary and arts magazine of City College of San Francisco! CCSF is a crossroads for students of all ages and backgrounds — and bright futures — and we are always delighted to get a glimpse in Forum’s pages of what they have to offer through their writing and visual arts. We’re very much looking forward to this chance to celebrate the new issue of Forum, and to hear from many of the contributors to the magazine. Do come and support the school that nurtures 80,000 San Franciscans each year on their highly individual quests for self-fulfillment!
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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
