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!
Roxane 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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Terry Rodriguez, piano, and Ron Crotty, bass, join drummer Jon Frank, with Joe De Andreis on tenor sax and Noah Frank on trumpet… straight ahead jazz, traversing the territory characterized by the modes and changes of Bill Evans, Miles Davis and the modern masters of the music. Bassist Ron Crotty’s career started with the first Dave Brubeck Trio in the late 1940s. Trumpeter Noah Frank’s career started a decade ago while he was a student at San Francisco’s School of the Arts… young or old, these players are talented proponents of the art of jazz!
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Friday, April 12th, apres le jazz, beginning at 8:30 pm… Come to a celebration for Samuel Beckett’s birthday (born April 13, 1906 in Foxrock, Ireland…died December 22, 1989 in Paris)! Scott Baker, Val Fachman and some of the good thespians from PUS Theatre Company will take the stage with a few gems they’ve polished up for their Beckett showcase opening next week downtown… A bit of Guinness & Jameson will be poured in the hoary great writer’s honor! The full show runs 4/19 to 5/11 at the Bindlestiff Studio on 6th btw. Mission & Howard. It’s called “Sam I Am: A Processional of Short Plays and Prose by Samuel Beckett” and is indeed a processional, so the audience will be limited to 40 per show –book your tix now! The pieces performed at the Bindlestiff will be Come and Go (Sabrina de Mio, Ponder Goddard, Sylvia Hathaway); Not I (Valerie Fachman); Rough for Theatre…
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Linda King has sculpted from life the heads of many great beat and post-beat literary figures familiar to us here on the west coast… her lover Charles Bukowski as well as Ferlinghetti, Hirschman, Micheline, Norse, Winans and more. Buk’s head is in the window at Bird & Beckett for the next few weeks… Linda just brought it this morning to a rendezvous at Higher Grounds, the cafe down the street, where some of her paintings will hang later in the spring… This Sunday, March 3rd, at 2 pm, Linda will read from her just-published memoir, Loving and Hating Charles Bukowski. Back in the 1970s, Linda King, then a fetching young poet and the publisher of the lit rag called “Purrâ€, spent several feisty years in Buk’s intimate company, and she carries the torch and the tongs to this day. She’s a great character herself — a terrific woman, a really wonderful sculptor, a fabulous…
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Sunday, March 3rd – 4:30-6:30 pm. Skin & Bone. 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. Ian Dogole and Max Perkoff co-lead this quartet: Dogole on a variety of drums (hence, skin) and Perkoff on trombone (viz, bone). With them are the legendary Si Perkoff on piano (Max’s dad, as it happens, who learned his trade in the midtown Manhattan atelier of composer/arranger Hall Overton and in a measure of direct transmission from the loneliest monk himself, Thelonious Monk). Also, the very creative and interesting young bassist Sam Bevan. Expect a lively and adventurous couple of sets from some of the top musicians the Bay Area has to offer.
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Plenty on tap at the bookshop, so cancel all other plans, pray for rainy weather on all March Sunday afternoons so you’re not tempted by the hiking trails, and set your galoshes by the door for the trek down to the book shop… come in like a lamb and we’ll send you out like a lion! Mighty Mighty Culture in Glen Park! Sunday, March 3rd at 2 p.m. — Linda King: Loving & Hating Charles Bukowski — Linda King, then a fetching young poet and publisher of the lit rag called “Purr”, spent several feisty years in Buk’s intimate company and carries the torch and the tongs to this day. She’s a great character herself — a terrific woman, a really wonderful sculptor, a fabulous poet, a notable publisher in the day and a sly and eminently readable memoirist (cf, her new book of this title), and she lives in…
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Sunday, Feb. 24 – 2:30 pm: Walker Talks! a monthly series. Walker Brents III on “Walt Whitman & the Poetics of Democracy” followed by: Sunday, Feb. 24 – 4:30-6:30 pm. The Russo/Alberts Trio with Art Lewis. 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.  “swing fiercely, listen closely, and invest each note with soul” — jazz critic Andrew Gilbert on the Russo Alberts “modus operandi” In the late 1950s, pianist Don Alberts, bassist Don Russo and drummer Art Lewis all converged on the San Francisco jazz scene from various spots around the Bay Area. They quickly made names for themselves in a vibrant milieu boasting scores of great players and centered in the “Harlem of the West” — the Fillmore District — home of Jimbo’s Bop City, the Club Flamingo, the Club Alabam,…
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Quhat drowsie sleepe doth syle your eyes allace Ye sacred brethren of Castalian band Since the earliest days of the store, back in the late 20th century, Jerry Ferraz, peripatetic troubadour & bard, has been the cornerstone of our poetry readings — participating in the first triple bill of poets and hosting our ongoing series since its inception. Born in Eureka Valley back in the very early 50s, he proves the adage which posits that if you remember the 60s, you weren’t there… he lost a year or two along the way, and will be happy to take them back if you find them somewhere! Nonetheless, for decades he and his small guitars have been sighted at the bus stops, hovering over PG&E digs, wandering through the parks and bars and cafes… Now he drives an efficient little car, but he’s still the same wandering seer, mystic & trickster. And…
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This week: The 230 Jones Street, Local 6 Literary Jazz Band — also known as The Chuck Peterson Quintet. Series founder Chuck Peterson is out this week as he gets his chops back together after some minor dental work, but Frank Phipps will be ably subbing for him. And singer Dorothy Lefkovits has got somewhere she needs to be, so she’ll be back next month. But Glen Deardorff, the guitarist, has had a much more serious health crisis which we’ll know more about by Friday. Our thoughts are with him. Duncan James will sit in for him this session. Count on Howard Dudune, Dean Reilly and Tony Johnson to swing hard and sweet while their dear colleague and our fond friend Glen is on the mend. Take this opportunity to join us and your friends and neighbors in celebrating the music, the community and the common bond we share! Our…
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Kelly’s Cove has been putting out the most lovely run of books since publisher Bart Schneider got the itch to merge intriguing California writing and intriguing California art in beautifully crafted volumes… The books just feel good, as they arouse your curiosity and kindle the desire to crack them open and begin to absorb what they harbor between the covers. Then you find yourself lost in books that are deeper than you can really describe, that take their own time to go where they’re going, that are going somewhere you can’t be sure of but that make you sure you’re glad to be along for the journey. At the end, you’d have to read them again, go through them again, to know where you’ve been and where they’re taking you, what’s in them and what they’re made of, and even then you don’t know, but that makes you happy too.…
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Closing day of the San Francisco Bluegrass & Old-Time Festival! Triple Chicken Foot (from L.A.) plays Bird & Beckett! No cover charge, but we’ll be sure to ask you to help us pay the bands and we surely hope you will! Expect very limited seating and a big ol’ crowd and a very, very good time! All ages very welcome, though do be careful the kids don’t get stepped on (and please leave those big strollers in the car)! Triple Chicken Foot is an Old Time trio playing fiddle and banjo tunes and songs in Los Angeles, California with Ben Guzmán on fiddle/mandolin, Mike Heinle on banjo and Kelly Marie Martin on guitar. They all three sing. Says Jeff Kazor of the Crooked Jades, “They’ve single-handedly revived the whole Americana scene in L.A.” For over six years, playing old time music in Los Angeles, they’ve performed at the Autry National…
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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
