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!
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.”
Read More
“…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.
Read More
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..
Read More
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.
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
John Brandi grew up in California where he avidly hiked the Sierra Nevada and explored the Big Sur coast. He graduated from Cal State Northridge with a BA in art and anthropology, worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer with Quechua farmers in the Andes, held odd jobs in Mexico, drove a truck in Alaska, pruned vineyards north of San Francisco, and lived in a mineral shack above the Yuba River. In 1971, Brandi moved to New Mexico, built a cabin in a remote canyon, raised two children, and began teaching as poet in the schools. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, his books include poems, travel writing, haiku, and haibun. As a visual artist his paintings, collages, and haiga have been exhibited widely. John lives with his wife, poet Renee Gregorio, in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Jack Hirschman has said of Brandi, “He has been an open…
Read More
Each month, on the last Sunday of the month, Walker Brents III discusses a topic the springs from his own imagination and curiosity… this month, his musings will revolve around “the derangement of the senses”… that inner state made naked to the outer world through abandonment of all rational caution and self-control, whether deliberately attained through drugs and other self-inflicted means, or imposed upon the gasping man who has found himself in the blazing noonday sun of some vast desiccated natural landscape…
Read More
Sign Up for Our Weekly Emails!
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," 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.
____________
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!
TAKE OUR SURVEY
To take our SURVEY, click here, and help the BBCLP get to know you better! As Duke Ellington always said, we love you madly...
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
