On the last Sunday of each month, drummer Vince Lateano conducts a jam session for all comers, this month with pianist Parker Grant and bassist Robb Fisher sitting in for Vince’s regular trio partners, Ben Stolorow and Peter Barshay. Ben and Peter are away on assignment (getting traveling drummer Ron Vincent primed for his date at Bird & Beckett on Friday, June 2nd followed by two nights at Keys on the weekend). No charge to attend or play in the jam session, though your contributions are certainly welcome and appreciated to stake us to the trio’s guarantee. Most always a surprise or two, always a pleasure. It’s byob at Bird & Beckett, so if you want something to sip, bring it with you.

John Calloway, flute Murray Low, piano Fred Randolph, bass Ricky Aguilar, percussion Annette A Aguilar, drums, percussion, vocals $20-30 sliding scale cover charge (cash please!) BYOB, Reservations: 415-586-3733 We can never get enough of Carnaval! We’ve got a descarga’s cargo of rhythm for you in the bookshop with NYC drummer & bandleader Annette A Aguilar, a San Francisco native and a world citizen of the music with a wonderful band. Catch them Saturday night at Bird & Beckett!

Trumpeter Mike Olmos fronts the Tony Johnson Quartet tonight at Bird & Beckett, with Keith Saunders on piano and Eric Markowitz on bass, evoking countless nights of cocktails & beers, bebop & ballads, burners & bossas, standards & jazz classics at Jay Johnson’s venerable, now-gone bastion of San Francisco Jazz! Man, do we miss it! Catch the flavor this evening at Bird & Beckett’s 20+ years running Jazz Happy Hour in the Bookshop! Bring something to sip and a twenty for the band. That’ll git it! Photos courtesy Dennis Hearne (Featured photo, Tony Johnson, courtesy Jessica Levant)    

If you’re of a certain age, you well remember the brouhaha kicked up by Led Zeppelin when Little Roger & the Goosebumps launched their was-gonna-be-a-hit-record-but-immediately-embargoed “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island” back in 1978 on Berserkley Records, the little East Bay hit factory that gave us Earth Quake (“Friday On My Mind”), The Rubinoos (“I Think We’re Alone Now”), Greg Kihn (“Hurt So Bad”) and, the king of ’em all, Jonathan Richman, who went from “Road Runner” and “I’m in Love with the Modern World” to “Ice Cream Man” and enduring permanence in the rock firmament. Dick Bright alongside Roger Clark was at the core of Little Roger et al, the hardest working bar band in the Bay Area and up and down the coast back then. Dick’s been in the business ever since, grinding out a blue collar workin’ life in a tux as the bandleader at the Fairmount’s Venetian Room…

Kim Shuck hosts our zoomed 2nd and 4th Monday poetry readings – with featured poets and an open mic on the 2nd Monday of each month, and an all-open-mic format on the 4th Mondays. Tonight, it’s the all open mic version! Zoom in and bring a poem to read, or just come to enjoy the poets’ work! Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84350265713?pwd=eE84V3BYdWxiSFBHNHhmdUt1WTUzdz09Meeting ID: 843 5026 5713 Passcode: 244211  

Kierkegaard the poetic philosopher. Long honored as a founding spirit of what came to be called Existentialism, Kierkegaard’s appeal is even more hydra-headed than this. His ruling inspiration is to bring his readers into a deeper sense of themselves as they encounter the themes and metaphors which appear so richly in so many ways throughout his writings. We come to see him as a singular exemplar of a unique moral passion, gifted with numberless insights which only grow more profound as the ages roll on… Walker Brents III regales us with 90 minutes of cogent insight into the workings of the poetico-philosophical mind in one guise or another most every month, though he travels the byways of the American west in the summer and skips a few for that. Tune in to his talk via our Facebook page or YouTube channel. No in-store audience except by special request. Once you’re…

Gail Dobson, vocals Kam Mombasser, guitar Aaron Cohn, bass Omar Aran, drums and special guests $20 cover charge (cash please) Reservations, call 415-586-3733 BYOB Gail Dobson, a native-born San Franciscan with a smoky, amber contralto, traces her performance history to legendary North Beach haunts including the Purple Onion, the Hungry i and the Jazz Workshop, as well as the Bach, Dancing, and Dynamite Society in Half Moon Bay. For 23 years, she’s been the featured vocalist for Ray Brown’s Great Big Band, and she leads her own combos.Says Gail, “I’m a Jazz Singer, Recording Artist, Vocal Teacher, Mom, Grandma. I’ve sung all my life and have shared this blessing with my first husband, pianist George Muribus, with my late husband, Smith Dobson, pianist/singer, and with my children, Sasha Dobson, a fellow vocalist, and Smith Dobson V, a drummer, vibraphonist, saxophonist. I’ve experienced first hand what hard work and dedication, mixed…

Rebecca Faulker is a London-born poet based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the 2022 winner of Sand Hills Literary Magazine’s National Poetry Contest and the 2021 Prometheus Unbound Poetry Competition. Her work has been anthologized in the Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021 and published in journals in the UK and USA. Rebecca was a 2021 Poetry Fellow at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. She holds a BA in English Literature & Theatre Studies from the University of Leeds, and a Ph.D. from the University of London. The poems in her debut collection, Permit Me to Write My Own Ending (Write Bloody Press, 2023) span generations and timescapes – from gritty, defiant explorations of a London adolescence, to haunting poems detailing love and adulthood in the US. Faulkner’s language and form dissects the emotional impact of historical trauma, navigating and sharply reframing nationality and memory, interiority and…

Jim Witzel, guitar Dann Zinn, saxophone Brian Ho, organ Jason Lewis, drums $20 cover charge; BYOB Reservations, call 415-586-3733 Tonight at Bird & Beckett, Jim Witzel’s working quartet draws on original material from their current release, Feelin’ It, along with pieces from Jim’s album Give and Take, with a few standard tunes thrown in for good measure. Born and raised in the North Bay, Jim studied under John Handy at San Francisco State and went on to freelance extensively around the Bay Area, working clubs and concerts as both a leader and sideman with such players as Mark Isham, Art Lande, Mike Clark, Delbert Bump, Michael Barsimanto, Glenn Cronkite, Mike Formanek, Chris Amberger and Tod Dickow. During this period he joined the “Life is Color” band along with vocalist Jesse Foster and vibist Jon Ericson, and hosted a weekly television series “Jazz After Midnight.” Jim studied under guitarist Howard Roberts…

Tonight: The Scott Foster Quartet conducts “Further Experiments with Tom Hassett” Tom Hassett, drums Dan Seamans bass Jim Peterson sax Scott Foster, guitar Musical journeys flowing from the mind of Mr. Hassett, including repertoire from the John Scofield Quartet, Billy Strayhorn, Bill Evans and others Scott Foster has been bringing jazz to Bird & Beckett for twenty-plus years on Fridays, beginning in late 2002–when it was a weekly engagement for years with the late tenor player Chuck Peterson leading the band. Now, Scott leads his own combos and shares the Fridays with a passel of other bands, still holding down the third Friday of each month, 5:30 to 8:00pm. It’s the cornerstone booking in our jazz calendar. Scott is a supremely talented and versatile player, composer and jazz educator, always a pleasure to hear. Come down and find out for yourself. BYOB and a twenty for the band. Pay just…

A mainstay of the San Francisco jazz scene for years, bassist Adam Gay decamped for Brooklyn several years ago, where he’s been brewing beer and playing jazz, much to Brooklyn’s benefit and San Francisco’s loss! But he’s coming back to town for some good gigs, and one of them is at Bird & Beckett in the company of some old friends, colleagues and artistes. A quintet date that will fill you with pure joy, we assure you! Erik Jekabson, trumpet & flugelhorn James Mahone, sax Keith Saunders, piano Adam Gay, bass James Gallagher, drums $20 cover charge tonight for the quintet! It’s a bargain, to welcome Adam back. Cash please! BYOB  

Way out west… The Seducers — America’s favorite Honky Tonk band! Joe Goldmark, pedal steel       Mitch Polzak, lead guitar and vocals Tim Wagar, bass guitar       Paul Revelli, drums The Seducers play Bird & Beckett every other month – January, March, May, July, September, November – on the second Sunday of the month at 5pm. Alternating months feature a fine batch of San Francisco’s best Americana bands. There’s a little sin and seduction in each of us. And we’re all either a mother or came from one. Or both in some cases, come to think of it! Join us to celebrate! BYOB and a twenty for the band!

The short stories gathered in Angelo Presicci’s book, Fighting the Bad War present a vivid, first person account of realities that faced American soldiers in our war on North Vietnam and upon their return home. Published by Robert Anbien’s Night Horn Books in early 2022, Fighting the Bad War  has been republished and relaunched by Iven Lourie’s Artemis Press, which took on the book after Anbien passed away late last year. In November 1966, Angelo Presicci found himself manning an M50 machine gun atop an armored personnel carrier in the jungles of Vietnam’s Tay Ninh Province. He was a 22-year-old gay draftee from a small town in upstate New York. The linked stories in Fighting the Bad War are based on Presicci’s experiences in battle and on the long way home from America’s most unpopular war, the last entrusted to a citizen army. This was not their fathers’ good war.…

San Francisco journalist Denise Sullivan conducts a monthly series of conversations (the second Sunday of each month from 10-11 a.m.) with The City’s activists, educators, arts and cultural leaders and lesser-known workers, the everyday people who help make this place we call home, live streamed from Bird & Beckett Books Today’s guest is Malia Spanyol, who owns four unique small businesses in San Francisco and her most recent brainchild is Mother Bar. The queer and femme-centered space is located in the Mission, which has historically held space for queer/lesbian communities (despite price-outs and gentrification). Spanyol’s experience as a small business owner in the city – including the Muay Thai gym Woodenman, Thee Parkside, and La Lucha coffee shop – naturally led her to the creation of Mother Bar, dedicated to continuing lesbian culture in the Mission. Catch the conversation between Malia and Denise on Sunday 5/14 at 10, live streamed…