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!
Latif Harris has contributed to the San Francisco/North Beach literary scene since 1959. In addition to his publications of poetry, articles, reviews and various anthologies, Latif has published eleven books of poetry, including Bodhisattva’s Busted Truth. Latif’s skill, energy and devotion to the work is evidenced in the crucial BEATITUDE GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY 1959-2009, co-edited by Latif with Neeli Cherkovski, and published and distributed by Latif.  This is an unequaled anthology of Beat literature – a classic work of contemporary poetry. Latif is currently working on a large “Autobiopoetic†collection of poems covering 50 years of his work.  His reading today, and a second reading on Sunday, June 2nd will include material from his memoirs, old and new poems, and many good humored anecdotes revealing the many dimensions of his life in poetry.
Read More
Jazz to stretch your mind… Hamir Atwal, drums and Michael Coleman, piano. Both players have picked up a lot of playing time on the progressive edge of the Bay Area jazz landscape, as well as handling the straight ahead traditions with skill born of experience and training — at Oberlin for Michael and at Berklee School of Music for Hamir.
Read More
Scott Foster has another engagement this week… he’ll be back with a great band on the third Friday in June. Tonight:  The Harvey Robb Quartet, with Grant Levin, piano; Ollie Dudek, bass; and Danny Spencer, drums. Reed player Harvey Robb has deep Detroit roots — where he grew up in the late 1950s sneaking into the jazz clubs & more legitimately gaining access to other venues to breathe the air filled with the cascading music of the likes of Yusef Lateef, Barry Harris and Elvin Jones.  These jazz legends, along with Curtis Fuller, Pepper Adams, Doug Watkins, Sir Roland Hanna and many others, were able to perfect their art in an industrial city where people headed for the late shift or coming off the swing shift could make the cash registers ring all night long — just the excuse the club owners needed to justify late and long hours filled with music. Harvey came out to California in the…
Read More
Carlos Suarez considers the work of the great writer, whose passing has us so many of us considering the time we first encountered One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Read More
Jerry Ferraz is known widely for his link to the bardic tradition, with his small guitar and wandering ways and his long poetic narratives in song that roll out without recourse to the page.  Unfettered to contemporary preoccupations, they can be at the same instant timely in the most uncanny of ways.  Certainly, The Golden Key is among his most fascinating tales, a thing to be marveled at, to be taken in and savored.  Live recording tonight! A poets’ open mic follows, as it does every 1st & 3rd Monday at Bird & Beckett. Next session, May 19th, Jerry’s good friend and mentor, the philosopher/psychologist Sterling Bunnell will deliver his long-form narrative, Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale Completed.  Read more on both Jerry and Sterling here.
Read More
Two Franks — drummer Jon and trumpeter Noah — bookend a group that includes guitarist Jordan Samuels, pianist Dave Gibbons and bassist Rob Woodcock this Sunday for our “which way west?” concert. This Sunday, nestled into two sets of standards, modern jazz masterpieces and new compositions, the quintet will treat us to a sequence summoning the spirit of the Miles Davis’ classic post-bop “Miles Smiles” sessions of 1966. Those sessions, with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams alongside Miles, produced key quintet recordings of Shorter’s “Footprints” and “Dolores” and Eddie Harris’s “Freedom Jazz Dance.” Drummer and band leader Jon Frank graduated from SFSU with a BA in music education and has been orchestra director at Hoover Middle School for more than 20 years. Â All along the way, he’s gigged on jazz dates and has led his own small combos, including this one. Â He’s been heard at…
Read More
Riding the backdraft of that big ol’ semi known as California Bookstore Day, Bird & Beckett will be proudly displaying (and selling) some eyepopping examples of what some particularly lovely publishers have to offer. Â There will be cookies & juice & discounts too! Â Do drop in!
Read More
On the first Friday of each month, our weekly jazz in the bookshop series features Don Prell’s Seabop Ensemble. Bassist Prell is a veteran of the 1950s LA-based Bud Shank Quartet and 30 years with the San Francisco Symphony. He’s a fiercely avid jazz player, willing to play anywhere and any time and has been a key to keeping our weekly jazz series going these many years. SeaBop is the ensemble crafted for the date by Don Prell, drawing on some of the best jazz musicians in the Bay Area. That said, the group has settled into a vital groove with reed player Jerry Logas and pianist Michael Parsons, lately augmented by Vinnie Rodriguez on drums.
Read More
Each month, Walker Brents III spins a tale investigating the work of a poet, a philosopher, perhaps a bit of mythology or a vast national epic — or some other subject that holds a fascination for the incurably curious among us. Today, as the annual frolic known as the Glen Park Festival unfolds just down the block, Walker will muse on the Bhagavad Gita, a tale with uncountable implications, found within the Mahabarata, India’s great religio-mythological epic.
Read More
Nilsson Schmilsson! Wrap up your Glen Park Festival outing with this romp deep into the catalog of famed-among-many-of-us American pop songwriter Harry Nilsson. Â The addled brainchild, or rather the rational brainchild of delightfully addled improvisors Christopher Gray, Joshua Raoul Brody and their stalwart cohorts, this event is the reprise & elaboration of a memorable evening they staged here at Bird & Beckett a few years back. Expect the unexpected, but warmly familiar work of a favorite American eccentric.
Read More
Plenty of fun in the sun this Sunday at the corner of Chenery & Diamond in the heart of Glen Park… come up the block to the bookshop when you need a break from the festivities, & browse awhile… Keep in mind we’ve got a talk at 2:30 on the Bhagavad Gita and, at 4:30, as the Fest is folding its tents, a gaggle of performers singing their hearts out in a tribute to pop maestro Harry Nilsson. Â (See the posts above.) more info on the Glen Park Festival at this link.
Read More
Bootstrap Productions has just published new books by poets Ryan Gallagher (Red Book of Blues) & Sunnylyn Thibodeaux (As Water Sounds), and will be celebrating their release with a reading by the poets, hosted by Derek Fenner (co-publisher w/ Gallagher), Thursday, April 24th, at 7:00 pm. Ryan Gallagher is the author of Red Book of Blues (Bootstrap 2014), Plum Smash and Other Flashbulbs (Bootstrap 2005), and has translated The Complete Works of Catullus (Bootstrap 2008) from Latin. He also curated, edited, and designed Young Angel Midnight, An Emerging Generation in the Arts in Lowell, MA (Bootstrap 2011), a project funded by the Cultural Organization of Lowell. He is co-founder of Bootstrap Press and teaches high school literature and journalism at Malden High School. Sunnylyn Thibodeaux is the author of the full-length collections As Water Sounds (2014) and Palm to Pine (2011), both out by Bootstrap Press, as well as various…
Read More
Jeff Johnson, Ph.D., founder of UI Wizards, Inc., explores the psychology underlying the rules that make graphical user interfaces work. Early user interface (UI) practitioners were trained in cognitive psychology, from which UI design rules were derived. But as the field evolves, designers enter the field from many disciplines. Practitioners today have enough experience in UI design that they have been exposed to design rules, but it is essential that they understand the psychology behind the rules in order to effectively apply them. In Designing with the Mind in Mind, Jeff Johnson, author of the best selling GUI Bloopers, provides designers with just enough background in perceptual and cognitive psychology that UI design guidelines make intuitive sense rather than being just a list of rules to follow.
Read MoreRonald Sauer is a poet, translator and raconteur steeped in the work of Baudelaire, Aloysius Bertrand, Voltaire, Jacques Prevert, Jacques Roumain, the surrealists, and more. Â A little background on Michael Koch will follow. Jerry Ferraz hosts featured poets and an open mic at Bird & Beckett on the 1st and 3rd Monday of each month.
Read More
Daniel is a twenty-first century connoisseur with distinctive and often anachronistic tastes-aesthetic, culinary, and even mind-altering. When Daniel sets out to seek answers about his past in long-sealed documents, he makes a startling discovery that leads him on a cross-country quest. In the course of his travels, he becomes preoccupied with Antoinette, an enigmatic archivist who may hold the key to his search. When he discovers she may be involved with his closest friend, Roger, he comes to distrust them both. His quest becomes a dangerous obsession that drives him to the brink of madness. Rockwell’s prose evokes the dark humor of Edgar Allan Poe and the uneasy aristocrats of Edith Wharton in this new novel of aesthetic obsession. “With huge amounts of imagination and flair, Daisy Rockwell has written a wonderfully funny but ultimately chilling parable about the wages of connoisseurship. I thrilled to it.” -Henry Alford
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." 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.
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
