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!
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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We’ve been doing it for 11 straight years now– straight-ahead hard bop every Friday evening by seasoned pros and some of the most talented youngsters on the San Francisco scene, ever since sax player Chuck Peterson got the ball rolling back in October of 2002. Last month, we finished out our 11th year of consecutive Fridays, with never a missed date — that’s about 575 Fridays in a row, and counting! First Fridays, veteran bassist Don Prell (who traveled the world with the Bud Shank Quartet in the late ’50s) leads his Seabop Ensemble. Jerry Logas on sax & Michael Parsons on piano, plus a drummer to be named… Second Fridays, it’s drummer Jimmy Ryan and his Bird & Beckett Bebop Band, featuring hard driving jazz veteran Don Alberts on piano — with a front line on November 8th featuring Henry Hung on trumpet, and Danny Brown on sax, complemented by Aaron Cohn on bass. On the…
Read MoreAnd our other bills are all up to date! That’s a first for quite a long time, and we have the community to thank for it. This past Saturday’s “Rent Party” — a 10-hour bebop concert/jam that turned out the bookshop’s neighborhood patrons in substantial numbers – was a huge success. All of the store’s rent for November was covered by straight-out donations and substantial sales on the day of the event, so the money we started out the day with was available to cover the rest of our bills and get us caught up again. I only wish everyone “feeling the pinch” could garner such assistance from those close by. I well realize how lucky we are to be in a position to ask for and receive such massive help in a difficult time. Do you wish you could help all the little businesses in the neighborhood as easily as helping us? Throw a little extra business…
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Caroline Goodwin — newly announced poet laureate of San Mateo County! — moved to the Bay Area from Sitka, Alaska in 1999 to attend Stanford’s Creative Writing Program as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her work has been widely published in literary journals in the US and Canada; a short collection entitled Text Me, Ishmael was published in Wales, UK in 2012 as part of the Literary Pocket Book Series and her first full-length collection, Trapline, was published in May 2013 by JackLeg Press in Chicago. Read more at this link. She received her MFA from the University of British Columbia; she lives in Montara and teaches in the MFA Writing Program at California College of the Arts and also the Stanford Writers’ Studio. Laura Walker is the author of Follow–Haswed (Apogee Press, 2012), bird book (Shearsman Books, 2011), rimertown/ an atlas (UC Press, 2008), and swarm lure (Battery Press, 2004), and the chapbook bird book (Albion Books, 2010). She grew up in North…
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Guitarist George Cotsirilos, bassist Robb Fisher and drummer Ron Marabuto have been making astonishingly lovely music together for several years, and this date marks the release of their third CD as a unit. Join us for a beautiful and intense afternoon of music. GEORGE COTSIRILOS: GUITAR.  George has been a member of the San Francisco Bay Area jazz community for many years and has performed with a wide variety of artists, from San Francisco jazz fixtures like Eddie Marshall, Mel Martin, Pharaoh Sanders, and Mark Levine, to internationally recognized blues singer Etta James, cabaret singer Jane Olivor, Bill Evans bassist, Chuck Israels, and the jazz/soul vocal group, The Whispers. In addition to working as an accompanist, he was co-leader of the San Francisco Nighthawks, which included drummer Eddie Marshall, Bobby McFerrin pianist Paul Nagel, and former Cal Tjader bassist Robb Fisher. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Cotsirilos studied…
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Ok! Push comes to shove… we gotta raise the rent! Fortunately we know legions of tremendous jazz musicians & they’re not hesitant to lend a hand… From the time the doors open at 11 a.m. ’til we push ’em shut at 9 p.m., the bop will not stop. That’s not just a rhyme scheme, friends, it’s what we live for! Well, that & a good book. So if you want your little bookshop to keep going, help us get over the hump. We just need to catch up with the rent that’s due & all those other bills that keep coming in the mail! Once in awhile, it takes an extra infusion, is all. So fall by & push some cash into the donation buckets if you can. $20 or whatever you can do. You’ll be getting good value for your money… the musicians are playing for free, and the…
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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
