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!
Pianist Larry Dunlap and vocalist Bobbe Norris have been performing together since the late 1970s, married since about the same time. Born in San Francisco, she was singing at shopping center openings and like by the age of twelve. She was sitting in at Bop City in the 1950s while still a teen and, “discovered” by John Hammond of Columbia Records, began to build a strong reputation and career in New York in the ’60s before leaving the business and heading back west.  Her partnership with Larry brought her back to the mic, and together they’ve been a strong draw in clubs, cabarets and concert halls for decades. Larry entered the jazz business in Portland, playing with Leroy Vinnegar and Ralph Towner, before coming down to the Bay Area.  Beginning in about 1980, he toured for nearly three decades with Cleo Laine and John Dankworth.  Along the way, he’s…
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Join us Saturday night, April 5th, to celebrate the fifth edition of our annual literary magazine, Amerarcana.  On hand for the reading will be contributors Duncan McNaughton, Richard O. Moore, Julien Poirier, Sunnylyn Thibodeaux and Sarah Heady, joining editor and designer Nicholas James Whittington and cover artist Jack Whittington. Amerarcana is really Nick’s baby, and we’re mighty proud of what he’s accomplished over the five issues since its debut in 2010.  It was beautiful and edifying out the gate, and its standards and quality have only grown stronger over time.  Help us toast the new issue & send it out into the world. Visit Amerarcana’s webpage for detail and background.  Better yet, stop by the bookshop to pick up a copy and see for yourself. An East Bay launch party will take place a week later, on Friday, April 11th at 8 pm, with contributors Micah Ballard, Steve Dickison, Marina Lazzara, Jackson Meazle and John…
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Bassist Heshima Mark Williams is a San Francisco native whose playing springs from thirty years’ experience of the Bay Area’s rich musical heritage.  Heshima studied under the tutelage of the first African-American classical bassist in the Boston Symphony, Dr. Ortiz Walton.  He has toured with trombonist Julian Priester; trumpeter Eddie Henderson; saxophonists Pharoah Sanders, Sonny Simmons and Idris Ackamoor (as a member of The Pyramids); vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson; and pianist Jeff Chimenti.  And he has recorded on albums by Julian Priester and Bobby Hutcherson, as well as Japanese pianist Saya Saitol, jazz blues vocalist Lady Memphis and jump blues vocalist Lavay Smith; The Pyramids; saxophonist Robert Stewart; and guitarist Calvin Keyes, among others.  Along the way, Heshima has also performed with countless other Bay Area artists, including jazz violinist India Cook, vibraphonist Yancey Taylor, and Destiny Mohammed, harpist from the hood.  Currently, he can be found performing at Ritz-Carlton properties throughout…
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“Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honor. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground, and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. Thus am I, a feather on the breath of God.” Walker Brents III interprets the life & expression of the 12th century mystic, teacher, writer, composer. Â Born in 1098, Hildegard lived to the age of 80. Â A nun at age 18, she had a series of visions in her late 30s and early 40s which she wrote out and explicated over the next dozen years. Â Her paintings and musical compositions further illuminate her insights and remain influential to this day.
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A fabulous journey into the life and art of this amazing artist who created over 2000 works of art in the last ten years of his life.  Artist and educator Marlene Aron will show over one hundred slides, including childhood drawings, rarely seen early works on paper, and paintings from his Impressionist years in Paris to his final years in the South of France and north to Auvers-sur-Oise. You will hear stories of Van Gogh’s  life, his childhood, places he lived and jobs he held before he became an artist.  An in-depth look at one of the most brilliant and influential artists of the 19th Century, whose vivid use of color and expressive brush strokes was to influence generations of artists, and paved the way to the Modern Art Movement of the 20th Century and beyond. Marlene Aron, artist, educator, and published poet, was herself educated in The Netherlands at the…
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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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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
