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!
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But nothing beats being in the room with the music & the musicians!
Mark your calendar! Bird & Beckett goes to the movies… at the Balboa Theatre in San Francisco’s Richmond District… March 16-20. Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood: Classic & Contemporary Bengali Movies from Tollywood! ♦view the schedule at this link Before there was Bollywood, there was Tollywood– so dubbed in 1932 for the Tollygunge neighborhood of Kolkata (Calcutta) in which most of the Bengali-language movie production offices are based. Tollywood has long been the proving ground of many talents later usurped, exploited and made rich & famous by the Mumbai-based Bollywood machine. Why is Bird & Beckett throwing a Tollywood festival? It’s no small thing that we get to give Bay Area moviegoers a peek at Aparjita Tumi, the brand new feature film by award-winning director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury (Antaheen won Best Film at India’s National Film Awards in2009).   Aparajita Tumi was shot last summer entirely on location in the Bay Area,…
Read MoreSunday, February 25 2:30 pm – Walker Talks! on the German poet Holderlin Once a month, Walker mesmerizes us with his fascinating meanderings amidst the meanings of writers, philosophers, mythologies and mysteries… how he does it, we don’t know, but he’s gained a following that hangs on the gossamer threads of thought that he spins. Holderlin? Come and find out… 4:30 pm – WordWind Chorus Brian Auerbach, Q R Hand Jr. and Lewis Jordan (shown left to right here) are joined by Julian Carroll in an acapella jazz poets aggregation that will set you on your ear. Four voices augmented by Lewis’s saxophone weave an intricate web of word strands to create heady music indeed. Founding WordWind member Reginald Lockett, who left us a few years ago, had this to say about Q R: “Q R Hand’s poetry traverses the terrain of form, music and language. This is an inspired,…
Read Moregirlchild Join debut novelist Tupelo Hassman for a book launch party, with live music Saturday Feb. 18th 7 pm to 9 pm Read the New York Times review here! The author: Tupelo Hassman The book: Girlchild (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2012) The band: Buckeye Knoll “Life is a crazy risk, a foolish venture, a journey hardly worth attempting by poor daughters raised by poor daughters who have no maps or guidebooks (and no teeth, either), who receive no justice that doesn’t hurt about the same as the injustice it means to remedy. This story is your worst white nightmare. Tupelo Hassman’s GIRLCHILD is a triumph and a philosophical treatise on survival.” –Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of National Book Critics Circle and National Book Award Finalist American Salvage Author Alan Kaufman in conversation with publisher & writer Brenda Knight on his new memoir, Drunken Angel — Sunday, February 19th…
Read MoreSunday, February 12, 2:00 pm Judith Sender & Ramon Sender Ramon and Judy Sender will be reading from their books. Judy — a writer and artist, or a wrartist, as she terms it — will read some excerpts from her new book, “Transitions Visible and Invisible.â€Â Her earlier book, “Lines: Whimsical and Other Wise,†has long been available through Bird & Beckett. Both books feature her drawings and poems, and express her multifariously whimsical take on things. She is a retired SFUSD teacher and since, 2001, she has co-curated with her husband, Ramon, the “Odd Monday Series”, first at Noe Valley Ministry and now at the venerable Phoenix Books. Ramon Sender has a long-standing reputation as an important west coast musician, writer and artist. In 1961, with Morton Subotnick and Pauline Oliveros, he co-founded the groundbreaking San Francisco Tape Music Center, home to the late artist Bruce Conner and musician Bill…
Read MoreComing up now at Bird & Beckett!  Jazz in the bookshop on Friday… and every Friday always 5:30 to 8:00 pm never a cover charge, but we always implore you to contribute what you can to help us pay the musicians, who deserve far more than they ever receive. They give us so much; this is our chance to give them a little something back! The Third Quintet! Friday, Feb. 17, series founders Chuck Peterson (sax), Scott Foster (guitar) and Don Prell (bass) are joined by drummer Omar Aran for two sets of bebop with a west coast lineage… Chuck and Don both got their start in the music in the early 1950s and have been playing jazz at a high level ever since. Scott and Omar have been top players for only a couple decades each… You’ll dig it. Sundays before and after, The San Francisco Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival…
Read MoreJazz in the bookshop a tradition in the neighborhood every Friday evening since 2002 Kids always welcome & always free! $10 suggested donation per adult This Friday, February 3rd, it’s Don Prell’s Seabop Ensemble, featuring series stalwart Don Prell, a Los Angeles native who started his jazz career in the 1950s and was soon a core member of Bud Shank’s renowned quartet — traveling internationally and recording albums on Pacific Jazz, Contemporary and other key record labels associated with the “West Coast Jazz” of the late 50s and early 60s. On the first Friday of each month at Bird & Beckett, Don shanghais a seasoned crew of jazz pros, drawing from a pool of talent unmatched by any city in the country outside of New York… Tonight, you’ll hear the powerful & lyrical tenor player Jerry Logas, young bop titan Michael Parsons on piano, and Ulf Bjorkbom, Swedish wonder of the…
Read MoreDecember 18th – Sunday, 4:30 to 6:30 pm Kids welcome & free! $10 suggested donation per adult Chelm Feelharmonic Klezmer Band which way west? sunday concert series Providing just a bit of a counter to all that Xmas mania, trombonist Rick Elmore, a musicological genius if we’ve ever known one, has collared some top local players with decades of musical collaboration under their collective belt for a klezmer & yiddish music extravaganza at Bird & Beckett! Mandolinist Gerry Tenny has been a cornerstone of the Yiddish music scene here for decades, and he joins Rick and Mike Perlmutter on clarinet, plus accordionist Ilya Cremer, fiddler Mike Hayes and cellist Leo for a roaring celebration of Jewish music and culture, two days in advance of Hanukkah (which begins this year on December 20 and runs to the 27th). Rick started at age 10 in 1964, and…
Read MoreFresh Print Some new books to please the avid reader: Patti Smith is an icon and a touchstone for hundreds of thousands of us… from the arrival of “Horses” in 1975 to the 2010 release of her memoir, Just Kids, and her HSBG appearance that same year, and the many stops along the way… In 1992, a talismanic little book bearing her name and called Woolgathering appeared on the counter at places like City Lights & Moe’s, on cafe tables at the Trieste, in squalid rooms at the Chelsea Hotel… places where the tribe tended to gather to muse, to share a meal, to conceive of new modes of expression… Woolgathering was one in a series of small (3″x4″) handmade books put out by Raymond Foye & Francesco Clemente’s Hanuman Books, printed at Kalakshetra, near Madras (now Chennai), India, under the supervision of George Scrivani. Like Patti herself, the gem-like…
Read MoreYour support is what makes it work! The community that’s grown up around Bird & Beckett has been a delight to be part of. Glen Park has been hugely supportive of the bookshop and our programs. As individuals, you’ve helped by buying books, of course– and also by coming to the shows and underwriting the cost of putting them on. For many years now, this community has been providing a sweet venue, a welcoming and appreciative environment and generous monetary support to writers, musicians and other performing artists by way of Bird & Beckett. We can all be very proud of that fact! Friends of the bookshop helped us establish a 501(c)3 nonprofit several years ago — the “Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project” — which is charged with accomplishing the cultural programming that we do. And individuals can take a full tax deduction for any direct contributions they make…
Read Morewondering what you’ve missed? here’s a sample… also hit the “older posts” button below to stroll back through the weeks… a few sundays ago… Sunday, November 27 – three events At 1 pm: I’m Not a Tourist! I Live Here! Ex-Glen Parker & committed activist Elizabeth Boardman sold her house here and moved to Davis a couple of years ago, but not before compiling the stories of quotidian San Francisco in her book I’m Not a Tourist, I Live Here! Elizabeth will be joined by one of the locals she’s observed and gotten to know over her long tenure here — Doc — a gracious and good humored man who’s lived by his wits in this town for a good long time, using his dulcimer to break the ice with folks scurrying through the BART stations on their way hither & yon. As for Elizabeth, herself, she’s stood in front…
Read MoreFresh Print Some new books to please the avid reader: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Goldblatt. In this gloriously learned page-turner, both biography and intellectual history, Harvard Shakespearean scholar Greenblatt (Will in the World) turns his attention to the beginning of the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture’s foundation: the free questioning of truth. It hinges on the recovery of an ancient philosophical Latin text that had been neglected for a thousand years. In the winter of 1417 Italian oddball humanist, smutty humorist, and apostolic secretary Poggio Bracciolini stumbled on Lucretius’ De rerum natura. In an obscure monastery in southern Germany lay the recovery of a philosophy free of superstition and dogma. Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things harkened back to the mostly lost works of Greek philosophers known as atomists. Lucretius himself was essentially an Epicurean who saw the restrained seeking of pleasure as…
Read MoreMonday, November 21, 7 pm Poets! Daniel Yaryan & Marc Olmsted open mic follows As a teenager in Santa Cruz, Daniel Yaryan fell under the thrall of poetry, particularly the poetry of the beats, in a big way. With his work, as a writer and as a impresario of poetry readings celebrating and extending the beat ethos, he has become, while still a young man, a major figure in the west coast poetry scene. We’ve lost track of how many readings Daniel has staged in venues all over the state in the series he calls “Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts” — each boasting a deep roster of energized and engaged voices revealing the breadth and depth of the poetry impulse that persists today. Daniel’s own voice will be on display at our reading tonight. He has invited Marc Olmsted to join him on this reading, indicating his respect for a poet…
Read MoreFriday, November 25th, 5:30-8:00 pm The Chuck Peterson Quintet jazz in the bookshop a neighborhood tradition since 2002 Also known as the 230 Jones Street, Local 6 Literary Jazz Band, this group comprises jazz in the bookshop founder Chuck Peterson (tenor sax) and four of his long-time associates: Howard Dudune (reeds), Glen Deardorff (guitar), Dean Reilly (bass) and Tony Johnson (drums). A quintet date that showcases the music we love best– straight ahead, bebop-based, west coast fashioned jazz. It’s a lively time in the neighborhood every Friday evening — in the venue that many a jazz player has declared the best place to play in town. That tribute is in no small way due to the audience that comes to enjoy the music and the convivial vibe. Come enjoy the music and the company. All ages are welcome, and there’s no cover charge — but if you can spare the…
Read MoreSunday, November 20, 4:30 & 5:30 pm (two sets) The Homespun Trio which way west? Sunday concert series Well, this isn’t a picture of the trio we’re presenting this week, but we went looking for photos and couldn’t resist this one. Martinique, circa 1944… Ernest Hemingway wrote the book, and Howard Hawks made the movie… the laconic pianist and songwriter Hoagy Carmichael made the music… Bogart and Bacall made the romance… “To Have and Have Not”… A title as enigmatic and evocative as any in modern literature… Oh yes, about this week’s “which way west?” concert! Bassist Fred Randolph, a much sought after musician about town in the clubs and concert halls, proposed this trio to us– featuring himself, the exquisite pianist Grant Levin, and the sweetly nuanced drummer Bryan Bowman. This may well be Grant’s first appearance at the shop. If so, it’s long overdue. You’re guaranteed to be…
Read MoreMonday, November 14th, 7 pm Ambush! A reading to celebrate issue #2 of a great new San Francisco literary magazine Co-Editors and Co-Publishers Bob Booker and Patrick Cahill host a raft of contributors at Bird & Beckett to present the beautifully done second issue of Ambush Review — a terrific addition to the long tradition of literary magazines emanating from this most literary city! Join us for a toast to the creators, writers and artists involved. Watch this YouTube video of Bob Booker introducing the first issue at Live Worms Gallery in North Beach in December 2010.
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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
