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…

Three celebrated Bay Area artists — a writer/choreographer, a director and an actor – have created a unique performance piece based on the book Dark Days and a Black Dog. Obie award winning actor Andrea Snow performs an intriguing, fully embodied “play/reading,” a new approach to bringing the written word to vivid life for an audience. Dark Days and a Black Dog, both the book and the performance, is rooted in the experiences of a family over seven heart-wrenching, darkly comic years that will, for many, feel both shocking and breathtakingly recognizable. The piece is directed by Jael Weisman, also an Obie award winner, whose work with legendary companies and productions has spanned almost fifty years. The book is by Emily Keeler, a four- time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship who has worked as a dancer, choreographer and writer in the Bay Area and New York..  https://www.darkdaysandablackdog.com/ Author Emily Keeler has been a dancer in San Francisco since 1974. She was a…

A reading to memorialize and celebrate the poet & publisher Robert Anbian. You can catch the live stream here on our website, and on our Facebook page or YouTube channel.

Ever since the pandemic began, Kim Shuck has conducted an open mic over Zoom under the Bird & Beckett auspices, attracting and serving a strong community of poets. The series continues apace, with two readings a month – 2nd and 4th Mondays at 7pm. On the 2nd Monday, there are usually two featured readers followed by an open mic. The 4th Monday reading is all open mic. This Monday, January 9th, the featured readers are Joshua Merchant and Paul Corman-Roberts, and the open mic just might include you! https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84350265713?pwd=eE84V3BYdWxiSFBHNHhmdUt1WTUzdz09 Meeting ID: 843 5026 5713 Passcode: 244211

When it’s the second Sunday in an odd-numbered month, it’s time for America’s favorite Honky Tonk band, The Seducers, with Joe Goldmark, pedal steel; Mitch Polzak, lead guitar and vocals; Hank Maninger, bass guitar and vocals; and Kenny Owen, drums. Bring a twenty for the band and, if so inclined, a bottle for yourself! Not able to come to the shop for the show? Donate any amount that seems fair to you ($10-20 suggested), and watch it in the live stream on our YouTube channel or Facebook page. Your donation helps us guarantee a fair wage to the musicians.