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!
Two veterans of the jazz scuffle perform solo and in duo interplay on the last Sunday of December… closing out another year of our Sunday afternoon concert series called “which way west?”  Ray and Duncan have often shared the bandstand (catch them at Club Deluxe on Haight) and have been heard individually at Bird & Beckett many times in the past with one combo or the other. Individually, they gig around town steadily.  A few years back, we invited them into the shop to play off and with each other, and it’s become something an end-of-the-year tradition — when other gigs don’t get in the way.
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Two long-time associates —  both hard driving professionals with 50+ years under their belts — take the bandstand with a young bassist who has become one of the mainstays of the local jazz scene. Pianist Don Alberts was born in the South Bay and made his mark on the San Francisco jazz scene in the early 1960s in venues including Jimbo’s Bop City, where he was house pianist for a stretch.  He’s a prolific composer and has put out several CDs, as well as books of jazz history, fiction and poetry.  Don has also recorded with the renowned bassist David Friesen and has shared the bandstand with the likes of Leroy Vinnegar, Chet Baker, Shorty Rogers and Bud Shank. Drummer Art Lewis was born in New Orleans but began his jazz career in San Francisco, and studied under Philly Joe Jones. Like Don, he played in the bustling 1960s jazz scene at…
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jazz club presents The Yancie Taylor Quintet — featuring James Bailey on reeds; Glen Pearson on piano, Ryan Lukas on bass and Bryan Bowman on drums, with Yancie himself on vibes.  Click here to visit Yancie’s site. Yancie has been a force on the Bay Area jazz scene for more than 50 years, and can be heard weekly at Geoffrey’s Inner Circle in downtown Oakland (view their site here)
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Klezmer Music by ~ Chelm Feelharmonik ~ Jeannette Levitsky – accordion Mike Perlmutter – clarinet Rick Elmore – bass trombone One rainy season, the downpours threatened never to end, the roads became impassable, puddles became miniature lakes, and rivers of mud flowed down the mountain. The town council was concerned. The people of Chelm couldn’t shop, children had to be carried from place to place, and even visiting the necessary presented an existential danger. Seven days and seven nights of discussion and debate resulted in the Rain Wall Plan. The elders agreed to empty the town treasury to build a six-foot wall around the entire village of Chelm to keep the rain out. Despite the terrible conditions in which the workmen struggled, the wall was duly erected. Unfortunately, the rain would not cooperate. It continued to fall even inside the Rain Wall! The elders met again. Their plight was dire.…
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Grant Stewart – tenor saxophone Patrick Wolff – tenor and alto saxophone Adam Shulman – piano Eric Markowitz – bass Hamir Atwal – drums “The primary reason that Wolff’s…concept works so well is that he’s found a stellar cast of creative allies. The music feels lived in, like it’s part of an ongoing conversation between widely read raconteurs… each tune is rife with idiosyncratic details that make it a welcome revelation.” – Andrew Gilbert, San Jose Mercury News Patrick Wolff’s quartet is joined on this date by New York-based tenor player Grant Stewart, an international favorite of critics and musicians, admired for his powerful tone and deep swing, and respected for his dedication to the art and language of jazz. In a rare series of Bay Area shows, Stewart joins the quartet in presenting the sounds of the classic two-tenor groups through compositions by Charles Mingus, Al Cohn, Freddie…
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Instrumental surf guitar and so much more! Â Listen, dance, groove, do what you want — we guarantee a good time at our new monthly series. Â Noon to 1:30 every second Sunday… the Surf-a-billy Swing Time Dance Party! Our December show: The Lee Vilensky Trio Guitarist Lee Vilensky, Bill MacBeath (bass) and Jamie Lease (drums) have been laying down an exquisite and rocking instrumental sound for years with this trio, rising from the ashes of The Swingin’ Johnsons. Â Lee hails from Long Island & New Jersey, and has put in serious time with Pearl Harbour and the Explosions, Thee Hellhounds and other favorites. Â Jamie has played with the likes of The Dils, Queen Ida and Her Bon Temps Zydeco Band, the PBR Street Gang, Norton Buffalo, while Bill’s affiliations have included Alvin Youngblood Hart’s band as well as Carlos Guitarlos… Their new album is Destination: Love — a fabulous follow up…
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Tonight, pianist Grant Levin changes it up, presenting saxophonist Jonathan Bautista, bassist Ricardo Diaz, and drummer Jon Arkin. Grant has been knocking us out for a couple of years now, latecomers as we are to the party that started rocking when he drifted down from UNLV, or was it Reno… falling in with some of the Bay Area’s best, most experienced hands, and quickly dazzling audiences with his fluidity, his harmonic nuances, his sheer joy at the keyboard. Â He’s a young cat, but his playing belies his years– trust us on that. Grant runs the show on the second Saturday of each month. Â If you haven’t heard him, you’ll kick yourself for not hearing him sooner. Â Now’s the time. Â Get down to jazz club and put yourself in Grant’s capable hands.
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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 December, Jimmy’s band features Henry Hung on trumpet and Stu Pilorz on trombone, with Don Alberts on piano, Bishu Chatterjee on bass and Jimmy himself on drums!!! 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, Ronnie’s Soulville and 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 that includes two horn players — Henry Hung, trumpet; Stu Pilorz,…
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Darlene Langston fronts a great septet playing the music of New Orleans when jazz was young. Â Andrew Storar, trumpet; John Hunt, trombone; Don Neely, clarinet; Duncan James, guitar; Alan Steger, piano; Al Obidinski, bass and Greg Gotelli, drums.
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Vocalist Gail Dobson has just released a deeply beautiful new 6-song EP called “How Fragile We Are” and will launch it here with terrific musicians who participated in the recording — Masaru Koga on sax, percussion and shakuhachi, guitarist Luke Westbrook and drummer Alan Hall, joined by bassist Peter Barshay.
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Join editor Todd Swindell, Neeli Cherkovski and Jim Nawrocki for a reading from the new volume of Harold Norse’s selected poems, I Am Going to Fly Through Glass, freshly published by Talisman House. Â Each knew Norse personally and can shed light on the life and the work of this major poet, born in Brooklyn in 1916 and resident in San Francisco, in the Mission District, from 1972 until his death in 2009. Allen Ginsberg met Harold Norse on the streets of Greenwich Village in 1944, both men embarking on a life of letters, reshaping what America knew of poetry and giving birth and shape to a new literary generation. Â Ginsberg was 18, but Harold was 28, steeped in the classics, boasting a close association with W. H. Auden and proclaiming the influence of William Carlos Williams. Â Norse became renowned for his embrace of a vernacular approach that would characterize the…
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Emily Wolahan explores the interstitial space between words and between people. She notes, “The electrical charge of an encounter—with another or with oneself—creeps into and charges my work. I like to explore the action of thinking and the action of looking.” “Every part of your day will be ………………this part of your day.” An open mic follows. Jerry Ferraz, m.c. visit www.emilywolahan.com Hinge BY EMILY WOLAHAN (forthcoming from National Poetry Review Press, 2014) Hinge is a book fixated on contingency and what it might mean to live in it. These meditative lyrics are radically, at times painfully aware that anything could happen, that “The only guarantee is the world / in transition.†This awareness walks hand in hand with Wolahan’s almost preternatural sensitivity to cause and effect, the syntax of the physical and the interplay of the parts that make up any given whole. More than any younger poet I…
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Pianist Walter Earl improvises effortlessly and fluidly, drawing on great reserves of emotion and experience. He’s played jazz for decades as well as doing a lot of work on film scores and the like. Â We’ve heard him here solo and working with poets, and now look forward to this trio date covering jazz standards and original material.
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Walker Talks! Â The last Sunday of each month… This month, Walker Brents III ponders an enigmatic 16th century seer, a doctor in a time of plagues and cataclysms whose uncanny ruminations and oblique, dire prophecies of the future have dazzled and intrigued generations. Nostradamus was a learned and intuitive scholar, a renaissance humanist, a symbolist poet whose grasp of his own time and its possible futures reveal much about the extra-rational underpinnings of our own time of supposed right and reason.
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Four colleagues — jazz professionals for six decade, if not more. Charlie McCarthy, sax Ray Scott, guitar Chuck Bennett, bass Jim Zimmerman, drums. These musicians are all well-traveled, highly regarded players, and have been getting together on a weekly basis for years — when not traveling, that is….
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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." 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.
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 through our fiscal sponsor, Jazz in the Neighborhood.
Click on "donate" in the navigation bar above. Better yet, send or drop off a check made out to our fiscal sponsor, Jazz in the Neighborhood, with BBCLP in the memo line. Our mailing address is:
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
