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!
The Pasha Band is made up of some of the finest middle eastern musicians to be found in the San Francisco Bay Area. Husain Resan, oud, violin and vocals; Younes Al-Maqboul, violin; and Amina Goodyear, percussion, make up the core of this group, with an additional one to two musicians to be added as the concert approaches. Husain Dixon Resan hails from Iraq, where he began his study of the oud at age 14 in Bayt al-Fann in Baghdad, joining its music ensemble at age 16. Coming to the U.S., Husain studied violin at City College, and has been a key component of the middle eastern music scene here in San Francisco for many years. Joining Husain in the Pasha Band is violinist Younes Al-Maqboul, who has set a very high standard for the violinists here since arriving from Morocco several years ago, and Amina Goodyear, a renowned figure locally for her work as…
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Here Tomorrow: Preserving Architecture, Culture, and California’s Golden Dream book release reading and celebration with writer J. K. Dineen. J. K. Dineen writes about urban planning, architecture, and real estate for the San Francisco Business Times. His book is fresh out from Heyday Press. Old buildings in our midst call to the imagination, evoking a time just out of reach. Each structure in Here Tomorrow holds a story of California’s rich past in its wainscoting, adobe brick, or Art Deco chandelier. The Temple of Kwan Tai on the fog-wreathed Mendocino coast contains the history of a once-vibrant seaside Chinatown. A garden of honeysuckle, roses, and tulips once tended by prisoners flourishes on the dry and windy island of Alcatraz. Colorful mosaics, glasswork zodiacs, and historic murals grace the walls of the Los Angeles Public Library, a structure conceived as a great melding of cultures and lore that reflect the diverse…
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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. Sunday, October 20th – 4:30-6:30 pm: Harvey Robb, sax; David Udolf, piano; Ron Belcher, bass; Danny Spencer, drums. Harvey Robb, tenor sax, has deep Detroit roots — where he grew up in the late 1950s sneaking into the jazz clubs & more legitimately gaining access to other venues to breathe the air filled with the cascading music of the likes of Yusef Lateef, Barry Harris and Elvin Jones.  These jazz legends, along with Curtis Fuller, Pepper Adams, Doug Watkins, Sir Roland Hanna and many others, were able to perfect their art in an industrial city where people headed for the late shift or coming off the swing shift could make the cash registers ring all night long — just the excuse the club owners needed to justify late and long hours filled with music. Harvey came…
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Jazz in the bookshop… every Friday without fail. San Francisco’s longest running neighborhood jazz party! Every third Friday, guitarist Scott Foster brings in a newly constituted ensemble for the occasion. Joining guitarist Scott Foster at Bird & Beckett this Friday, October 18th, are trumpet player Dave Scott, bassist Aaron Germain and drummer Surya Prashanka. This quartet has several years of experience playing as a unit, and has a deep reservoir of tunes at their disposal. In the second set at Bird & Beckett, they’ll pass around their book of tunes to the audience and honor any request. It’s Audience Choice! 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 &…
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Thursday, October 17th at the bookshop on Chenery Street in Glen Park, 7 pm: Bird & Beckett in association with Litquake presents “Cherokee Voices” – Poets Kim Shuck and Indira Allegra joined by folksinger Ed Dang for a program of poetry and music, followed by an open mic hosted by Jerry Ferraz. Kim Shuck is a poet, weaver, educator, doer of piles of laundry, planter of seeds, traveler and child wrangler. She was born in her mother’s hometown of San Francisco, one hill away from where she now lives. She is a career artist in textiles and words. Her first book, Smuggling Cherokee, won the first book award from the Native Writer’s Circle of the Americas. Her new book, Rabbit Stories is being described as a ‘treasure’ and ‘like being given a basket of magic’. Indira Allegra is a poet and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores forms of queer intimacy, text, trauma and racial…
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Sunday, October 13th, 7:00 pm at the Vogue Theatre 3290 Sacramento Street, at Presidio Bird & Beckett, in association with Litquake, presents: “Mohin’s Horses: South Asian Oral Literature, Poetry & Music” We’ve put together an exciting program of poetry, theatre, music and film for the opening weekend of Litquake that will feature: — Playwright Ranjon Ghosal performing a 30-minute segment of his full-length one-man play based on Rabindranath Tagore’s crucial speech titled “The Crisis of Civilisation”, which Tagore delivered just months before his death at age 83. The play takes a look at Tagore’s life work and these pivotal thoughts expressed eloquently at the very end, in 1941, as the world teetered on the brink of chaos and collapse. Tagore saw the problem of the modern world clearly, as the colonization of the mind. Ranjon Ghosal has traveled from his home in Bangalore in the South Indian state of Karnataka for this event…
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Retro Blue is a band that fully embraces the jazz tradition: swing, bop, blues, r&b and free style, and explores uncharted sonic areas as well… Leader Jim Ryan has been on the Bay Area music scene since the late 90’s and began his active music career in Paris, France in the early ’70s, participating in Steve Lacy’s weekly free jazz jam sessions in Paris. Karl Evangelista is a young, highly original and accomplished guitarist who moved to Oakland from his hometown Los Angeles several years ago. He teaches and is constantly gigging in Oakland and San Francisco. Eli Wallace, a native of the Bay Area, recently received his Masters Degree in Music from The New England Conservatory in Boston. Now he’s back home writing, teaching and gigging with several area bands. Eric Marshall plays upright and electric bass in jazz and improvised music groups. He also leads his own group…
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If you’re ready to trail back to the neighborhood Sunday afternoon, Oct. 6th, by 4:30 or so — after three or four days of Golden Gate Park crowds for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass — we’ll extend the spirit of the affair here at Bird & Beckett. Sunday, October 6th, from 4:30 to 6:30 pm, our “which way west?†series presents Laurel Thomsen, violinist, violist and singer-songwriter, who’s enthralled us before on the bookshop’s stage with her gorgeous flights through old-time Americana, Celtic tunes and originals.  In her recent collaborations, she’s been lauded as a fine blues and Grappeli-esque fiddler as well. A Monterey, California native, Laurel trained classically, but in her early twenties found a home playing in bands, doing studio work, backing singer-songwriters, and as the New York Times reported, being one of those cutting edge teachers moving their private studios online via Skype. At Bird & Beckett, Laurel will entertain with all original songwriting,…
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If you’re ready to trail back to the neighborhood Sunday afternoon, Oct. 6th, by 4:30 or so — after three or four days of Golden Gate Park crowds for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass — we’ll extend the spirit of the affair here at Bird & Beckett. And a week later, Litquake begins — and will include two big Bird & Beckett events. Read on! Sunday, October 6th, from 4:30 to 6:30 pm, our “which way west?” series presents Laurel Thomsen, violinist, violist and singer-songwriter, who’s enthralled us before on the bookshop’s stage with her gorgeous flights through old-time Americana, Celtic tunes and originals.  In her recent collaborations she’s been reported to be quite the Blues and Grappeli-esque fiddler as well! A Monterey, California native, Laurel trained classically, but in her early twenties found a home playing in bands, doing studio work, backing singer-songwriters, and as the New York Times reported, being one of those…
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Alan Kaufman and William Taylor, Jr. join Colleen McKee to celebrate the publication of her first full-length collection of ficton, poetry and memoir, Nine Kinds of Wrong, hot off the presses from JKPublishing. Expect tales of a beautiful world of addictive sorrows; glamorous, unwise sex; crime and cabaret; and more whiskey-soaked death than you can shake a stick at. Colleen has been known to say that she writes poems, memoir, and fiction. That she also teaches people how to communicate about art at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. What else? That she writes most of her poems on public transportation; dreams frequently and in color; and can probably kick your ass in Scrabble. She once claimed to write every day and to try to be a nice person. Were that to fail, said she, she tried at least to be honest. That was when she was promoting her poetry. Now, with this, who…
Read MorePeter Cherches is the author of Lift Your Right Arm (Pelekinesis, 2013) and two previous volumes of short prose, Condensed Book and Between a Dream and a Cup of Coffee. His work has appeared in the anthologies Poetry 180 and Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992. His fiction and other short prose work has been featured in a wide range of magazines and journals, including Harper’s, Semiotext(e), Transatlantic Review, Fiction International, North American Review, Fence and Bomb. Cherches was active, on page and on stage, in the raucous and unpredictable literary, music and performance scenes of downtown Manhattan in the 1980s. Sonorexia, the avant-vaudeville music/performance group he co-led with Elliott Sharp, appeared at such legendary venues as The Mudd Club and CBGB. Cherches also writes about food and music and is a two-time recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships in…
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Once a month — except during those summer wanderings when he rambles the west to make sure the roads still lead on…that annual meander with the lovely Joyce that keeps him rooted in the American grain — Walker Brents III dips deep into a ten gallon hat brimming with his thoughts on the vast implications of history, myth and the cogitating tendency we humans can’t ever quite escape, whether from the north, south, east or west… So, here it is, late August, no, now it’s late September, and lo! Walker has a few more things to say, sparked particularly by those long, long moments stretching out across the seemingly infinite flatlands that comprise the llano estacado, an American marvel so big and wide it’d likely make you feel like a mite on the back of a big ol’ Texas longhorn… Welcome back, again, Walker…
Read MoreFivePlay Jazz – featuring Dave Tidball, reeds; Tony Corman, guitar; Laura Klein, piano; Paul Smith, bass; and Alan Hall, drums – celebrates the release of their new CD, “Five and More.” – Melodic Modern Jazz… About the players: Dave Tidball (woodwinds/composer): Born in Cardiff, Wales, Dave played and recorded in London with Turning Point. Upon moving to Boston, MA, he formed the group Minotaur, which featured his own compositions. Since relocating to the Bay Area, he has played and recorded with Triceratops, Three Tenors No Opera, the great vocalist Paula West, and his own trio, Threedom. Dave teaches music in the Oakland public schools and has a busy freelance playing schedule. Tony Corman (guitar/composer): Tony comes from the Boston area. He graduated from the Berklee College of Music with a B.A. in saxophone performance. He appeared and recorded with Full Faith and Credit big band, the Contemporary Jazz Orchestra,…
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Monday, October 5th – 7 to 9 pm
POETS! Dan Richman featured,
followed by an open mic
Jerry Ferraz hosts
Dan Richman returns with poems in hand. He read on our first bill of poets back in 1999 or so, and has continued to write all along, taking in the terrain on which San Francisco is built, the birds circling in the skies above, the people who inhabit it, going about their business day to day. An hour in his company is time well spent. Bring your own work to read in the open mic, if you care to. Jerry Ferraz, who m.c.’s our twice monthly poetry series, was a co-reader with Dan on that first reading back when the store was just getting started. All along, Jerry has been the continuous element in our understanding of what it is to be a poet in San Francisco.
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 A Benefit Performance to raise funds for visiting playwright Ranjon Ghosal The Classical Music Traditions of South India and North India intertwine with American Jazz in an historic first encounter between renowned musicians Prasant Radhakrishnan and George Brooks. Carnatic/Jazz Saxophonist Prasant Radhakrishnan Hindustani/Jazz Saxophonist George Brooks bassist Bishu Chatterjee tabla player Vishal Nagar and jazz drummer Rusty Aceves  ~ tickets for the September 24 benefit are available in advance at the bookshop ~ Ranjon Ghoshal will be coming to the Bay Area in October from his home in Bangalore, in the South Indian state of Karnataka, to perform his play “Crisis of Civilisation: A Journey With Tagore”  — first, as an excerpt on a program that will be presented on Sunday, October 13 by Bird & Beckett at San Francisco’s Vogue Theatre as part of the annual Litquake festival; and subsequently, at full-length at an East Bay venue and…
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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
