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!
Jeff DeMark drives down from Humboldt County, returning to his old neighborhood and Bird & Beckett to tell some of his stories, play a little guitar and sing a few songs, with ample support on guitar by Oakland singer-songwriter Jerry Zeiger. DeMark is originally from Wisconsin, and has been writing and performing for decades. He’s performed his stories with Milwaukee’s Violent Femmes, Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeeans, and others. After moving to San Francisco in the 1980s, he developed five one-man modern storytelling shows and commenced to tour them widely. Along the way, DeMark has taken the stage at New York’s Knitting Factory, The Marsh (and Bird & Beckett) in San Francisco, and venues in Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Madison as well as Venice, CA and Newport, OR. Now, he’s most often found in performance in cafes, nightclubs and schools around Northern California with La Patinas, a six-piece band, doing his…
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The 4th annual Bird & Beckett Review, AMERARCANA 2013 is here now, so please come down to the bookshop to check it out, and join us on Saturday, April 6th to celebrate and hear from a few of the contributors, including, but not necessarily limited to: Patrick James Dunagan, Christina Fisher, Jack Hirschman, Ava Khoobor, William Rockwell, Rod Roland and of course me, aka editor Nicholas James Whittington. Additional local contributors who may or may not join us include: Barry Gifford, Carrie Hunter and Stephen Ratcliffe. Others unlikely to make an appearance: Nathaniel Mackey, Jesse Morse, Mary Austin Speaker and Elizabeth Witte. Artists Jason Grabowski & Basil King both live out in New York these days, but if we’re lucky the former might make his way out here for the big show. So, about the magazine… well, you can read more about AMERARCANA here, so please do!
Read MoreOur Friday evening jazz series has been going strong for more than a decade, and features four great bands in rotation each month– but on those lucky occasions when there’s a fifth Friday, we get the opportunity to bring in a different aggregation for your pleasure… this Friday, it’s pianist Michael Parsons with a fine quintet featuring Jay Sanders on trumpet; Danny Grewen on trombone; Eugene Warren on bass; and Ulf Bjorkbom on drums. All five are young stars on the local jazz scene, and all five have played at one time or another on the Bird & Beckett stage. We’re pleased and proud to present them as a unit under Michael Parsons’ leadership. Much of the show will showcase Michael’s compositions; all of it will bop with alacrity. Come down and enjoy yourself. And bring a few bucks to help us pay the band!
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Each month, Walker Brents gives a talk on a subject literary, poetic, mythological, or wherever his investigations lead…Â This month, the poet William Butler Yeats and his enigmatic system articulated in the work called “A Vision”
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which way west? Sunday concert series. All ages welcome! No cover charge, but your generous donations make it possible for us to pay the musicians. Sunday, March 24 – 4:30-6:30 pm: Hindustani (North Indian) Classical Music. Bird & Beckett is pleased to present two concerts of Hindustani classical music on the last two Sundays in March, of which the first was a vocal recital by Pooja Chaudhuri accompanied by tabla player Ferhan Qureshi. This second concert in the series reprises two previous Bird & Beckett duo appearances by Mallar Bhattacharya and Ferhan Qureshi. Mallar Bhattacharya (sarode) is a student of the instumental and vocal music of the Acharya Baba Allauddin Seni gharana of Maihar and Rampur, India. Mallar began his musical training at the age of three, learning both Western and Hindustani violin from his father Dr. Jahar Bhattacharya, a viola student of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. After taking regular…
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Monday, March 25th at 7:00 pm, Poets Patrick James Dunagan, Derek Fenner and Christina Fisher read poems and engage in repartee. Dunagan’s upcoming booke, Das Gedichtete, may or may not be hot off the Ugly Duckling Presse, in Brooklyn, and if so, may be read from. Regardless, there will be words to be heard, and, to be sure, a slim and extremely limited edition of poems by all three for distribution at the reading, so don’t miss out! A graduate of the Poetics program at New College of California, Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at Gleeson library for the University of San Francisco. Just bout now or sometime his writings appeared in: 1913, Amerarcana, Big Bridge, Bookslut, House Organ, Lighting’d Press, Newpages, Otoliths, Rain Taxi, Shampoo, and The Volta. His books include Das Gedichtete (Ugly Duckling), There Are People Who Say That Painters Shouldn’t Talk: A…
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which way west? Sunday concert series. All ages welcome! No cover charge, but your generous donations make it possible for us to pay the musicians. Sunday, March 24 – 4:30-6:30 pm: Hindustani Classical Vocal Recital. Perhaps as long as three thousand years ago, the Vedic chant tradition originated in ancient India, setting the Sanskrit Vedas in metrical form for oral transmission. The North Indian (Hindustani) and South Indian (Carnatic) musical traditions diverged in about 1200 CE from this common root, both comprising other elements as well, and continuing to this day to be the principal traditions of Indian classical music with their own highly developed conventions, practices and repertoire. For both, melodic modes, the ragas, are combined with metrical beat cycles, the talas. Hindustani music adds to the Vedic material melodic ideas from Persian Sufi folk traditions among other sources, and was developed through the work of numerous eminent composers…
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Patrice Vecchione writes about what it means to be alive and alert to the world around her. She’s a woman who never left her girlhood jump rope behind, an artist unafraid of glitter, one who’d rather be near than far, an ordinary woman who, through poetry, celebrates the extraordinary in daily life. Her new book is The Knot Untied. Stay after the half-hour reading, if you like, for conversation with Patrice about the knots poetry can untie that no other form can and a brief poetry workshop.
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H. D. Moe (born 16 Nov. 1937) is considered one of the most important of the “baby beat” poets, with over 30 books of poetry to his credit. Living in Berkeley, California, Moe has served as editor and publisher of Beatitude Press, Embassy Hall Press and Deserted X Press, and as editor of the Berkeley Review of Books. Among his more recent publications are a book of philosophy (How To Be God Now) and two volumes of poetry (Always Home and Birth To Birth).  A living legend, H. D. Moe is currently working on a new book about a real and imaginary journey called Royal Poetopia and The Wild Law Civilization. Come out to Bird & Beckett and catch the master. H.D.Moe’s website is found at http://www.hdmoe.com/ We are also graced to present Cesar Love, celebrated poet and educator, a Latino poet influenced by the Asian masters, a revitalizing voice…
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which way west? Sunday concert series. All ages welcome! No cover charge, but your generous donations make it possible for us to pay the musicians. Sunday, March 17th, 4:30 pm- Interstellar Space: John Coltrane’s Universal Music and Spirituality Dr. Anthony Brown–multiple percussion and Dr. Leonard Brown–saxophone, with Richard Grieg–bagpipes and poet Genny Lim, will present a concert of music illustrating the spiritual engagement of the great tenor saxophone player John Coltrane. Dr. Leonard Brown, Professor of Music and African American Studies at Northeastern University edited the recent book John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music (Oxford University Press, 2010). Dr. Anthony Brown is director of the Asian American Orchestra, a Smithsonian Associate Scholar and a contributor to that groundbreaking anthology. In a panel discussion to follow the concert portion of the afternoon, Drs. Brown and Brown will be joined by fellow contributors Dr. Herman Gray…
Read MoreRoxane Beth Johnson’s first book of poetry, Jubilee (Anhinga, 2006), was the winner of the 2005 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Philip Levine was the judge. Her second book, Black Crow Dress, will be hot off the press from Alice James Books. She has won an AWP Prize in Poetry and a Pushcart Prize, 2007. She has received scholarships/fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Cave Canem, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from: Harvard Review, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Image, Callaloo, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Chelsea, ZYZZYVA, The Bitter Oleander, Sentence and elsewhere. Robin Ekiss is former Stegner Fellow, recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award, and author of The Mansion of Happiness, a finalist for the Northern California and California Book Awards, and winner of the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize. She’s also a contributing editor at ZYZZYVA,…
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Betty Wong hosts a musical celebration of the Chinese New Year with a cavalcade of music from Asia and North & South America, featuring faculty and friends of San Francisco’s Community Music Center (CMC). Classical and folkloric pieces from a number of traditions will be featured on the first half of the program, with a jazz quartet filling out the second half. Betty Anne Siu Junn Wong, long a faculty member at CMC, is particularly renowned for her work as a founding member of the Flowing Stream Ensemble, likely the first regional troupe to bring traditional Chinese music to Bay Area audiences outside the Chinese community. But she is equally enamored of western classical music and American jazz, and all of these passions are brought to the fore in what has become an annual Chinese New Year concert tradition at Bird & Beckett.
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Sunday, March 10th, at 2 pm:
Retrofitting Babel – An Informal Talk about Translation and Translators
Carlos Suarez addresses a few salient issues of translation: How to make a mess and influence literary history without getting caught. The at times amusing troubles poetry translators get into, and how they survive them. The uses of mirrors and echoes to fake a translation, and other tricks of the trade. The dictionary as cemetery and purgatory. And, if there is time…and there will be time…he will present a few of his own translations of short poems from South America and Italy, from the poets Dante, Borges, Julio Cortazar, Carlo Betocchi, Cesar Moro, Patrizia Valduga, Enrique Suarez and Gaetana Aulenti. Carlos Suarez, Argentinian by birth and a man of the wider world by proclivity and experience, had a distinguished career as a photographic journalist that took him far afield over the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s. In Buenos Aries, he grew up with Enrique Suarez and encountered Borges;…
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Jerry Ferraz hosts our once-a-month, third-Thursday poetry session, usually featuring one or two strong local poets followed by one of the most intriguing open mics around. This month, Virginia Barrett and Bobby Coleman are our featured poets. Two poets sensitive & righteous at once, comfortable in their own skins and confident in the play of words and the meanings they can evoke.
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live jazz in the bookshop every friday Beginning this July, guitarist Scott Foster leads a quartet of his own in Bird & Beckett’s third-Friday-of-the-month slot… 5:30 to 8:00 pm… no cover charge, but your donations at the shows and your tax-deductible contributions to the Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project make it possible for us to pay the musicians. Bring a few bucks, or several, for the band and show your respect for the tradition and those who keep it alive! Buy a book to help the shop keep the lights on! Now in its eleven year, this long-running neighborhood jazz party hasn’t missed a Friday since October 2002! First Fridays: Don Prell’s Seabop Ensemble Second Fridays: The Jimmy Ryan Quintet Third Fridays: The Scott Foster Quartet Fourth Fridays: The Chuck Peterson Quintet Not to be missed!
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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
