She’s back! Come hear the boogie woogie & blues maven Wendy DeWitt blow the house down with her partner Kirk Harwood on drums and the inestimable blues guitarist Takezo Takeda, the Soul Man from Japan! BYOB and a twenty for the trio! Reservations, call 415-586-3733 Here’s the trio’s last Bird & Beckett show! Check it out… Wendy caught the attention of Western Swing Hall of Famer Tommy Thomsen (Sonoma) at age 10, and hasn’t stopped since. Former pianist for Hank Ballard and Steve Freund, Wendy has also played with Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Charlie Musselwhite, Otis Rush and Jimmy Thackery. She tours national and international festivals and produces the annual Queens of Boogie Woogie and San Francisco International Boogie Woogie Festival, which draws artists from around the world. “All the cool kids already know DeWitt is one smoking boogie woogie piano/organ gal and it’s time for the word to…

Bird & Beckett presents featured poets and an open mic on the first Thursday of each month, hosted by Michael Koch and Jerry Ferraz. James Cagney’s second poetry collection, Martian: The Saint of Loneliness is the winner of the 2021 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. His first, Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour Of Chaos Theory won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2018. Both titles are available from Nomadic Press. For more information, please visit JamesCagneypoet.com. Tureeda Mikell, is an Oakland native, award winning poet, MoAD 2022 Poet in Residence, original Black Panther alum, griot, story medicine woman, Qi Reader, author, and educator. She has published over 70 at-risk student anthologies from 5 bay area counties.  Hailed, activist for holism hell bent on asserting life, her works have been published and or traveled from Africa, France, UK, Australia, Japan, and China. Her book, Synchronicity:…

Vince Lateano, drums Peter Barshay, bass Ben Stolorow, piano All jazz players welcome to take the stage. Or just come to listen. No cover charge. If you can’t make it into the shop, you can catch the live stream on our Facebook page or YouTube channel.  Your donations to help pay the trio and support the stream are much appreciated! Bird & Beckett adheres to the guaranteed fair wage standard promoted by the Independent Musicians Alliance.

Gerald Beckett, flute Michael Gold, saxophone Greg Jacobs, piano Carl Herder, bass Greg German, drums $25 cover charge; byob Reservations, call 415-586-3733 Streamed live on our YouTube channel and Facebook page. Born and raised in Texas, flutist Gerald Beckett is a stalwart of the San Francisco music scene. Eight years of classical training at the San Francisco Conservatory, combined with extensive jazz studies with some of the leading teachers in the Bay Area, has left Beckett with a firm command of both his instrument and the jazz idiom. About his most recent CD, his sixth, Downbeat Magazine had this to say: A common juke-joint sound is pervasive on several of flutist Gerald Beckett’s compositions—particularly on “Down Low,” “Club Raven” and “Shacktown.” Each tune has a rollicking mood that resonates with a gut-bucket blues feeling. But there are other sounds on MOOD, and none more chocked with hard-bop ingredients than “Minor…

Shake off the workweek with a happy hour or two in the company of veteran drummer Tony Johnson and his merry crew — Bob Kenmotsu on tenor saxophone, Keith Saunders on piano and Matt Montgomery on upright bass. Two solid sets of straight ahead jazz & bebop, swing & bossa nova. Tony has been plying his trade in San Francisco since he immigrated from Australia in 1959. Straight off, he was busy in the clubs and on the road — and recorded a memorable album live at The Cellar on Grant Avenue in North Beach in 1960 with vocalist Bev Kelly, in the company of saxophonist Pony Poindexter. He’s never stopped since. BYOB and a twenty for the band! Can’t make it to the show? On Fridays, we’ll be streaming just the second set, starting at about 7pm. To hear the first set, you’ll need to brave the elements and…

All open mic! Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84350265713?pwd=eE84V3BYdWxiSFBHNHhmdUt1WTUzdz09 Meeting ID: 843 5026 5713 Passcode: 244211

Timothy Orr•drums/percussion Mark Clifford•vibraphone Safa Shokrai•double bass Max Judelson•double bass Heikki “Mike” Koskinen•e-trumpet/recorder Joshua Marshall•tenor saxophone Rent Romus•alto saxophone $25-35 sliding scale to support these seven musicians! byob reservations: 415-586-3733 live stream (please donate) on the Bird & Beckett YouTube channel and Facebook page. Rent Romus’ Life’s Blood Ensemble pays tribute as well as brings to light, reinvents, deconstructs, and delves into the deep realms of their collective vision. Their repertoire features original composition and contemporary local and international composers while exploring the influences and inspirations from free improvisation, jazz, folk, and world. This performance @ the iconic Bird & Beckett Books will feature new music, some of which will be debuted as part of a new recording project “In the Spirit”. more information: http://romus.net/lifesblood.html https://youtu.be/pfST5WMY2dM https://soundcloud.com/rent-romus/manala-demo Rent Romus is a saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist, composer, bandleader, music producer, and community activist. Since 1988, his work on the saxophone has been dubbed “ferocious”…

devorah major, San Francisco’s third Poet Laureate (2002-2004), is an award-winning poet and fiction writer, a creative non-fiction writer, performer, editor, and part-time senior adjunct professor at California College of the Arts. She was poet-in-residence of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco for 28 years. devorah has toured Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and all over the United States performing her poetry and speaking on panels focused on African-American poetry, Beat poetry, and poetry of resistance. She is the author of two novels and six books of poetry. Her fifth book of poetry, and then we became was published by City Lights in 2016 and her sixth, Califa’s Daughter was published by Willow Books in 2020. Dee Allen is an African-Italian performance poet based in Oakland, California U.S.A. Allen is active in creative writing and spoken word since the early 1990s. Under POOR Press, he has published four…

Get ready for a Hammond Organ Party with the Wayne De La Cruz Organ Trio with Tony Alvis, saxophone and Mark Lee, drums. $20 cash cover charge. BYOB. Reservations, call 415-586-3733 Doors open at 7:20. Can’t make it to the shop tonight? Donate and take in the show through the live stream on our YouTube channel or Facebook page. Wayne De La Cruz started on drums at age 9, moving on to vibes in middle school and organ in high school. A Baldwin spinet organ, it didn’t have the sound Wayne had in mind, a sound he remembered from the time his father took him to hear Ray Charles in 1968, when Billy Preston was at the keys of a Hammond B-3. In 1973, Wayne began his professional career, playing his first paying gig on Hammond organ at the age of 16. The Baldwin had been traded in for a…

Guitarist Scott Foster carries all the twenty years’ tradition of jazz in the bookshop! And beginning with this January 2023 third-Friday date, he returns our 2-1/2 hour Friday jazz “happy hour” to its original start time of 5:30pm. Henceforth, on Fridays you’ll find jazz in the bookshop from 5:30 to 8:00pm every week! Lose the tensions of the work week at Bird & Beckett with old and new friends. BYOB and a twenty for the band! (Sundays, you’ll often find live music with a 5pm start time — check our calendar. Saturdays and other weeknights, you can generally count on a 7:30pm start with doors opening 10 minutes before showtime – check our calendar for that, too!  Reservations are gladly taken by phone – 415-586-3733 – for the evening shows. We don’t generally take reservations for the Friday and Sunday shows unless you have a specific need for a chair.) …

Ibn Khaldun, 14th century diplomat, teacher, judge, visionary.  The archetypal polymath.  The surfaces of his reputation are vast.  He has been called the first historian, the first sociologist, the first economist.  He has even been referred to as the inventor of the Laffer Curve.  As much as all this may captivate our interest,  the mystery of his character remains elusive.  He is one of the most creative thinkers of all time, the architect of an intelligence we have yet to uncover… Walker Brents III has been illuminating Bird & Beckett audiences on a near-monthly basis for twenty years. His observations on poets, philosophers, myth, folklore and myriad other topics reveal a deep and perceptive intelligence that probes the universal in the particular, the entire cosmos in the raindrop. Indulge your curiosity and tune in! At the appointed hour, you’ll find Walker’s 90-minute live stream in the video window at the upper right…

The 1980s were formative years for Ron Jackson, studying guitar at Berklee School of Music, spending two years in Paris picking up the electric bass, returning to New York and the jazz guitar in 1987 and touring North America and Europe. In 1991, at age 27, he released his debut album as a leader, “A Guitar Thing,” with collaborators including Benny Green, Lonnie Plaxico and Cecil Brooks III. In the ensuing three decades, nine albums have followed as he’s grown in skill, experience and stature. In the 1990s, he was a member of a trio led by Rufus Reid as well as Randy Weston’s group. Since that time, a master of the six, seven and twelve string guitars, he’s played regularly in New York City at jazz clubs like Birdland, Iridium, 55 Bar and the Blue Note, and he’s worked with Oliver Lake, James Spaulding, Jimmy McGriff, Melvin Rhyne, Lonnie…

Avotcja, poet and percussionist, dj, musicologist and historian, is the very soul of Bay Area culture. We say that without fear of contradiction. And Modúpue, a flexible ensemble of amazing musicians converging from multiple cultural and musical directions, is her vehicle to transcendence. Tune into her radio shows on KPFA and KPOO for the musical truth! And tell everybody to tell everybody, then get down here to Bird & Beckett to hear them work! This evening, Sandi Poindexter, violin; Francis Wong, saxophone; Heshima Mark Williams, bass; and Myron Cohen, drums, join Avotcja in Modúpue to bring the fire of Wordsong to Bird & Beckett. $25 cash cover charge; sliding scale available. BYOB. To reserve seats, call the bookshop at 415-586-3733. Catch the live stream on our YouTube channel or Facebook page if you can’t make it to the shop. But if the stream is where you’re taking it all in,…

Sam Reider, piano & accordion Mat Muntz, bass Shawn Meyer, drums A San Francisco native out of Urban High, home of our stalwart guitarist Scott Foster, Sam Reider was turning heads at a young age as a preternaturally gifted pianist. Still young, he’s now been long established in New York and the wider roots world where he’s well known and acclaimed as an accordionist leading his band, the Human Hands on the bluegrass circuit.  Read up on him here. Tonight, the trio will play originals, some Django Reinhardt and some bluegrass fiddle tunes. No fiddle, but an accordion will do the trick on those, just you wait and see! Videos of Sam’s work: “Petrichor“ “Skeleton Rag”

Rod Sudduth, tenor sax Ken Cook, piano Doug Miller, bass Dillon Vado, drums $20 cover charge, byob doors open 10 minutes before the show for a reservation, call the shop at 415-586-3733 Can’t make it to the shop? You’re missing a good thing, but at show time you can catch the live stream (and donate) here on our website, and on our Facebook page or YouTube channel. Quartet leader Ken Cook is a graduate of the New England Conservatory in Boston and has been all over the Northern California scene for well over a decade, heard in major venues from Healdsburg to the Wine Country to the Bay Area and points south, playing jazz, blues, Latin and Brazilian music. He leads his own combos and is a first call player with Bay Area favorites John Calloway, Terrie Odabi, and Mark Summer (Turtle Island Quartet) and countless others. Ken holds the…