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!
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But nothing beats being in the room with the music & the musicians!
A Christmas season tradition at Bird & Beckett, join us for a trad jazz blowout on Sunday the 22nd with the sweet sounds of the 20s & 30s and a few Christmas favorites from the Buena Vista Jazz Band on the last Sunday before Christmas… The bandstand will be full to bursting with seven fine instrumentalists and a terrific singer:  Darlene Langston, vocal; Andrew Storar, trumpet; John Hunt, trombone and vocal; Don Neely, clarinet, soprano sax and vocal; Duncan James, guitar; Alan Steger, piano; Michael Kenny, bass; and Greg Gotelli, drums.
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During the holidays, we’re excited to welcome back the supremely talented young pianist Joe Warner, who’s been making a big impression on jazz audiences — and on some of the best jazz musicians in the Bay Area — for the past several years. This afternooon at Bird & Beckett, he’s playing with bassist Josh Hari and drummer Geechi Taylor. A superb trio, indeed! Joe is heard around the Bay Area backing top-flight vocalists including the Dynamic Miss Faye Carol and Kenny Washington and sharing the bandstand with instrumentalists that include Marcus Shelby, Ron Belcher, Howard Wiley and Robert Stewart.  He also produces the noteworthy “Jazz in the Basement” series at the First Congregational Church of Martinez — undoubtedly worth a trip out there.  Take a look at his website: http://www.joewarnermusic.com/ Joe will be putting his trio through their paces with jazz standards and a few Christmas chestnuts this Sunday at Bird &…
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With this special show the Crooked Jades will be gearing up to celebrate their 20th anniversary in 2014!! The Jades state that “Bird & Beckett has always been a great intimate venue to try new material, but in this case the core trio will be fearlessly attempting a 20-year retrospective, unearthing the Crooked Jades back catalogue from their proto-grass beginnings… ALL THE WAY, BACK, TO THE YEAR, 1994!” The Crooked Jades Trio for this special event is Jeff Kazor (vocals/guitar/ukulele), Lisa Berman(slide/banjo/harmonium), and Erik Pearson (banjo/dobro and harmonium).
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Hailing from way up in Miraloma Park, Robert Mueller leads this Americana/roots country rock outfit with Rick Santos, both contributing original songs, guitar work and vocals. With the stellar work of string wonder Peter Dominguez (dobro, banjo & guitars) and bassist/producer David Sands, the band is complete. Their tremendous, haunting & wry “Songs of Love, Blood & Redemption” is fresh out and well worth your dollars. Come hear the band and buy the CD! And oh yeah, Mueller plays a mean mandolin as well!
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Eddie Duran, guitar Chuck Peterson & Mad Duran, saxes Henry Hung, trumpet Dean Reilly, bass Vince Lateano, drums Back in 1952, young Eddie Duran was the house guitarist at San Francisco’s Say When Club on Bush Street when Charlie Parker was brought in for a two-week booking with co-headliner Flip Phillips.  Flip quit the gig after a week and Bird demanded that management dump all but Eddie from the bandstand, calling in drummer Larence Marable and a young trumpet player named Chet Baker, fresh out of the U.S. Army, making his first professional San Francisco gig.  Larance and Chet had just played an engagement with Bird at the Tradewinds, down in Ingleside near L.A., and were rarin’ to go. As it happens, a young reed player named Chuck Peterson (founder of Bird & Beckett’s Friday jazz series) was in the audience soaking it all up, having just arrived from Oregon, transferring from Reed College to San Francisco State College. Chuck still remembers Bird…
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Friday, Nov. 29th – 5:30-8:00 pm: Special Fifth Friday Booking!  Mike Lipskin, acclaimed Harlem stride piano master, teams up with reed player Jerry Logas, whose way with early New Orleans style clarinet is exquisite, and world-class ragtime guitar specialist Craig Ventresco. Born in New York, Mike Lipskin was digging his father’s Fats Waller records by the age of four, and by high school he was making his way to Harlem to learn the intricacies of Harlem stride piano technique from some of the originators of the music, including Willie “The Lion†Smith, Luckey Roberts, Cliff Jackson & Donald Lamberts. Listening to one of Mike’s recordings of the music, Waller’s guitarist from the old days, Al Casey, said “I think I’m with Fats right now!” We’re delighted to welcome Mike back to Bird & Beckett for this return trio engagement, in very good company indeed! Bird & Beckett regulars have a long love affair with…
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which way west? Sunday concert series every week, music from the four points of the compass no cover, donations requested Saxophonist Lewis Jordan writes: I began Music at Large in 1976, dedicated to interdisciplinary and multicultural productions, with presentations incorporating music, theater, dance, poetry and visual art. Since that time, Music at Large has been a vehicle for producing musical performances of my own and others’ work, plays, and panels. The genesis of the Music at Large is the commitment to bringing people together by bridging arbitrary distinctions that have only served to divide us from ourselves, as well as serving to divide us from others. As the saying goes, “put all my food on the same plate.†A few highlights include: In 1976, Music at Large featured a performance that included dancers Adela Chu, Andrea Sherman and Yuki Shiroma at the Metropolitan Art Center in San Francisco. Also in…
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Each month, Walker Brents III explores a topic from the realms of literature, mythology, history–wherever his interests take him–and he never fails to take his listeners along on a fascinating excursion deep into his subjects. This month he discusses a poet and a work of poetry which has held great fascination for him for decades, plumbing the ways in which it represents “a message for our times.”
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“…once upon a time in Babylon we all breathed pure imagination our only master & our mistress who tore men’s mind asunder and dazzled Heaven’s Queen O! Once upon a time in holy Babylon!” Ron Johnson reads at Bird & Beckett Sunday, November the twenty fourth, one thirty post meridian time
Read MoreThursday, November 21st, 7:00 p.m. Featured poets Dan Richman and Sally King Open mic follows. Jerry Ferraz hosts. Sally King is an artist and writer. Her recently published debut poetry collection, A Tale of Two Heads, is a series of phantasmagorically compressed dream lyrics, one extraordinary poem linked to another in a progression that is, for a reader, like watching someone become a poet right in front of their eyes. Her work has appeared in several Bay Area shows, and her film and book reviews can be found at www.blogundine.blogspot.com. Dan Richman writes poetry, plays, novels and essays. His latest novel is Tristan, Isolt, and the Sea. A volume of poetry, Farming in San Francisco, was published by Fithian Press in 2004.
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2 pm: Maria Hummel (House and Fire, American Poetry Review) and Austin Smith (Almanac, Princeton) read from their recent poetry collections. 4:30 pm: Homespun, with Grant Levin (piano), Fred Randolph (bass) and Bryan Bowman (drums) – two sets of elegant & lovely live jazz — from their gorgeous repertoire of standards and originals..
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Scott Foster’s group this Friday includes David Boyce, co-founder of Broun Fellinis, on saxophone, plus bassist Noah Schenker and drummer Dave Mihaly. All three of Scott’s sidemen on this date have extensive experience on the San Francisco jazz & related improvised music scene.  Each month, Scott enlists some of the most talented musicians around for his Bird & Beckett dates on the third Friday of each month — so we’ve been lucky to hear a rich variety of approaches and styles as the months go by.
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Orion Edmondson, drums, leads a quintet tribute to Philadelphia-born trumpeter Lee Morgan — famed for a hip, soulful, hard bop jazz output during the late 1950s and 1960s that became a significant soundtrack for the times. From New York, trumpeter Justin Smith handles the duties evoking Morgan’s sound and persona, while fellow bandmates Ruben Salcido on sax, Steve McQuarry on piano, Joe McKinley on bass flesh out the signature Blue Note sound that has never stopped reverberating through the music we know of as jazz… Morgan recorded 25 albums as a leader on Blue Note Records starting in 1956. Played on Coltrane’s 1957 “Blue Trane” album, was a long-time member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers alongside Wayne Shorter and Bobby Timmons, and hit big with his own “Sidewinder” lp on Blue Note in 1963. His last album was recorded for Blue Note in September 1971.  Morgan was shot in a club where he was performing in…
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jazz in the bookshop is our long-running Friday evening jazz shindig… now celebrating it’s 12th year! Nearly 600 consecutive Fridays of live jazz in an intimate independent book shop. Since the beginning, drummer Jimmy Ryan has been on the scene, and he now leads a sizzling jazz quintet — the Bird & Beckett Bebop Band — on the second Friday of every month. Tonight, Henry Hung, trumpet, and Danny Brown, tenor sax, make up the front line, with Don Alberts on piano and Aaron Cohn on bass joining Jimmy in the rhythm section. Jimmy & Don have both been on the San Francisco jazz scene since about 1960 when Don was house pianist at Jimbo’s Bop City (in the building that now houses Marcus Books) and Jimmy was a frequent performer there alongside the likes of the late great Bishop Norman Williams… Marcus Books is marching on — thriving really, despite attempts…
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Dazzling writing & great company Saturday night, November 16th, 7pm, at Bird & Beckett Books to celebrate the release of Jason Friedman’s short story collection! From a recent review: In a collection of seven pieces of literary fiction, winner of the 2012 Mary McCarthy Prize, Jason K. Friedman, confronts love and religion, family and sexual identity, faith secular and holy, and humor wry and hopeful, in an exploration of the Jewish experience in the American South. The collection opens with “Blue,†in which an awkward boy at his bar mitzvah takes his first stumbling steps toward adult awareness. After immersing himself in the Torah as part of the ceremony, he confronts the mundane. “Reunion†follows. A hip and edgy New Yorker reluctantly returns home to Savannah for his twenty-fifth high school reunion—there bemused and then seduced by a former classmate, “the rich kid who played football and baseball,†only to…
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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," 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.
Click on "donate" in the navigation bar above. Better yet, make a check out to the “Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project” and drop it off or mail it 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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We're immensely appreciative of Jazz in the Neighborhood for having stepped in as our temporary fiscal sponsor for a few months, while we straightened out some paperwork to get nonprofit status restored to the BBCLP. We're happy to say that's been done, and all past, present, and future donations made directly to the BBCLP are fully tax-deductible!
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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
