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!
Americano Social Club plays the perfect music for a sultry summer evening on the terrace of a beachside restaurant on the Adriatic, an idyll in Bahia, a midnight dalliance in a North Beach cafe…  or a lazy afternoon in a cozy little bookshop on the outskirts of town. Michael Zisman, mandolin, Jason Vanderford, guitar, and Joe Kyle, Jr., bass, effortlessly tease the romance from a repertoire that ranges from Brazilian sambas to Italian chestnuts to American pop confections to shimmering originals.
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A. D. Winans will read from his first short story collection, In the Pink — erotic tales released in January by Pedestrian Press with a cover too scandalous for Amazon.com, and thus issued simultaneously in a cover tame enough for that demure literary institution. For decades, we’ve admired A.D. as a straight talker, poet and West Coast small press publisher of major importance.  The books he put out under the Second Coming Press imprint as far back as the early 1970s did a lot to define an alternative literary sensibility of the times, and his own writings have always cast a jaundiced eye on the presumptions of the moneyed classes, the careerists and the poseurs, expressed with articulate and appropriate contempt.  The things and people he admires and loves get admirably straight-forward treatment as well. The late Jack Micheline said, “A. D. Winans is a man in search of his soul.  He has great…
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Every third Friday, guitarist Scott Foster brings in a newly constituted ensemble for the occasion. On March 21st, saxophonist David Boyce, bassist Scott Chapek and drummer Tom Hassett will join Scott to explore the compositions of Billy Strayhorn.  Strayhorn was a significant force behind the beautiful music of Duke Ellington, working with Ellington from 1938 until his own death in 1967 composing Lush Life, Take the A Train, Chelsea Bridge, Satin Doll and many more iconic tunes. Jazz in the bookshop… every Friday without fail. San Francisco’s longest running neighborhood jazz party!  Scott’s monthly Bird & Beckett sessions draw on the fantastic pool of jazz musicians that populate this little berg, from his years of experience gigging and teaching around town. One day we’ll realize what a golden era of jazz it is in San Francisco!  Don’t be shy to make it out to Bird & Beckett’s Friday and Sunday sessions…Â
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Jennifer Barone has been a featured poet at the Red Poppy Art House, the Beat Museum, SFMOMA, the DeYoung, the Randall Museum, the San Francisco Public Library and other venues. She was a winner of the 2007 and 2012 Poets Eleven city-wide contest to represent North Beach, selected by Jack Hirschman, former SF Poet Laureate, and the SFPL. She runs a poetry series called WordParty at Viracocha on Valencia Street, which has its roots in the poetry parties she began hosting in her living room in Brooklyn in the early 1990s. Jennifer is keen on collaborations with other artists, combining poetry, fine art and jazz in her performances and publications. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Saporoso, Poems of Italian food & love, with drawings by Lam Khong, 2012, Simple Language, 2003 and Secret City, 2007 – a bi-coastal collaboration with her father’s original artwork in response…
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Jesse’s vocal style has evolved from a deep immersion in the work of musicians like Wes Montgomery, Marvin Gaye, John Coltrane, Smokey Robinson, David Ruffin, Nat “King” Cole and Miles Davis.  He has developed an original composition and arranging style that conveys deep and personal messages through songs crossing a wide range of musical genres. For his Bird & Beckett engagement, he’s bringing in a fine group of collaborators — Grant Levin on piano, Pierre Archain on bass and Omar Aran on drums.
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Three titles from this new press will be presented by their authors, the poets Ivan Argüelles, Jack Foley and Clara Hsu. Of the press and its intentions, co-publisher (with Clara Hsu) Jack Foley puts it well indeed: ¶The point of “publication†is to make something public:  “the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.† Walt Whitman—whom we see sitting in a chair in our own Poetry Hotel—is the patron saint of such activity: the moment when deep interiority finds its way into the world. ¶Clara Hsu and I imagine our Poetry Hotel to be the place in which such a meeting occurs. Paper? Electronic? In Whitman the word “leaves†is a pun: “leaves of grass,†but also each page of a book is a “leaf.†Our “leaves†may at times be nothing but electronic impulses, yet that moment of transformation—“The sound of the belched words of my…
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Alejandro Murguia (SF Poet Laureate) leads off a panel discussion with John Avalos (District 11 Supervisor), Gen Fujioka (Public Policy Director, Chinatown Community Development Center) and Sarah Brant (SFUSD teacher & Ellis Act target). Join us to discuss the dilemma facing long-time residents and renters of modest means — and the gutting and gentrification of San Francisco — as real estate speculation and a quickly widening income gap drive rents to dizzying heights while the rental supply dwindles. Ellis Act evictions are buffeting many of our neighbors, and the lack of affordable housing affects us all. “There’s a difference between a neighborhood changing—which is natural and organic—versus the destruction of a neighborhood, its history and legacy, which is what is happening right now in the Mission District.” —Alejandro MurguÃa
Read MorePoets Judy Bebelaar (Walking the Pacific), Raffi Del Bourgo (Inexplicable Business), Ellaraine Lockie (Wild as in Familiar), Kathleen McClung (Almost the Rowboat), Laura Schulkind (Lost in Tall Grass) and Zara Raab (Rumplestiltskin, or What’s in a Name?) read from their work.
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Happy New Year!  Celebrate with us the Chinese Year of the Horse — and the advent of Daylight Savings Time:  come and enjoy a multicultural concert featuring faculty and friends of San Francisco’s Community Music Center! Yi Ming Li, guqin (ancient Chinese zither) Peter Frentzel, shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) Betty Wong, huluxi (Chinese folk gourd flute) and piano Shirley Wong Frentzel and the CMC Chinese Music Ensemble Katelyn Lui, piano, Elena Dillon, clarinet & John Smalley, baritone Harvey Robb and Ken Rosen (saxes), Betty Shaw  and Randy Craig (piano) & Richard Saunders, bass These performers will take us on a marvelous journey across the continents and centuries, with Tibetan folk music celebrating the year of the horse, music of Mongolia and ancient Japan… and on to Europe–France’s Poulenc & Germany’s Hindemuth…to the uniquely American jazz strains of Gershwin, Thelonious Monk, Benny Golson & Fred Hersh.
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Call the bookshop for reservations – 415-586-3733. $40 tuition David Meltzer, a poet whose roots are in the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat eras, will explore some of the “basic mysteries” of poetry & poetics in three sessions spaced over five weeks. David’s thoughts on the poetic calling range from the discipline’s roots in oral culture to the invention/ mythologies of writing systems, the book and the page, and the return to orality.  Some of the material covered comes from his book, Two Way Mirror: A Poetry Notebook.  Other material is from lectures originally given in the graduate Poetics Program at New College of California — exploring divination, the prophetic, Kabbalah, & the possibility & impossibility of language.
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Jinx Jones, king of the hollow body geetar, master of countless genres, avatar of the swing to rock from pure country to hard bop, visits Bird & Beckett as winter fades away with his jazzy little trio that’ll take you from Bob Wills to Thelonius Monk via Charlie Pride, Hank Williams, Hank Garland, Wes Montgomery, Les Paul and Kenny Burrell. What’s not to like? Â Get yourself down to the bookshop, pop down a beer & slide into spring the jazzabilly way. Surely, Jinx is one of the most skilled and likable guitarists on the San Francisco scene. Â Read more here!
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Bill Berkson is a poet, art critic & corresponding editor for Art in America, who for many years taught literature & art history at the SF Art Institute. Director of Letters and Science at the Art Institute from 1993 to 1998, he taught art history, critical writing & poetry & directed the public lectures program there from 1984 to 2007. He is the author of many books of poetry & prose including Portrait & Dream: New & Selected Poems, published by Coffee House Press in 2009.  Bill will read from his latest poetry collection, Snippets (Omerta, 2014). Elizabeth Block is the author of the novel A Gesture Through Time, written under fiscal sponsorship of Intersection for the Arts, in San Francisco. She is the recipient of a Doris Roberts/ William Goyen fiction fellowship from the Christopher Isherwood foundation and many other awards and residencies. Also a filmmaker, her films have traveled…
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For this fundraising evening to help poet Diane di Prima meet some of her ongoing medical expenses, she will read work from a recent collection,entitled “Poems Are Angels” and we’ll also offer for sale a limited edition broadside produced for the evening as well as several pieces of her art. Diane will also read some poems at random from the notebooks she fills while at concerts and readings, stimulated by the moment and the surroundings — these are the journals she identifies by their covers… the black notebook, the cork notebook, and so on. Diane’s February 1st event sold out!  However, Diane has agreed to read again one month later – on Saturday, March 1st – so reserve now. All of the seats and much of the available standing room has already been reserved by folks who couldn’t squeeze into Diane’s first reading, so call now if you want to…
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Ross Thompson, San Francisco-based composer and concert guitarist, is widely known throughout the Bay Area as a passionate interpreter and inspired creative force in the classical guitar tradition. He has received numerous commissions for original music and has released five recordings, including the acclaimed Winter’s Book. He recently served as the composer-in-residence for the California Shakespeare Festival, and performs internationally as a soloist, including appearances at  the International Festival of Contemporary Classical Music ( Peru) Kestenberg Musickschule Berlin Tempelhof-Schoneberg (Germany), Mozarteum of Uruguay (Uruguay), Seoul National University (South Korea), National Conservatory of Music (Argentina).  Ross is a faculty member of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. More information about his recordings and compositions available atwww.rossthompson.com.
Read MoreWalker Brents III discusses Herman Hesse.
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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
