Erik Jekabson, trumpet and flugelhorn Matt Zebley, alto saxophone Keith Saunders, piano Owen Clapp, bass Smith Dobson V, drums Two masterful horn players with a fabulous rhythm section. What’s not to like? Standards, bop, post bop, originals. Matt Zebley crosses the Bird & Beckett stage for the first time tonight, and we’re more than pleased to have him. The other players? Significant figures on the San Francisco jazz scene. A quintet to be reckoned with. This is jazz as it’s played in San Francisco and environs ca. 2022! $25 cash cover charge. BYOB. Doors open at 7:20pm for the 7:30pm show. Reservations: 415-586-3733 Also streamed live on Bird & Beckett’s Facebook page and YouTube channel. If you like what you hear in the stream, and stick around for more, donate to help us pay the musicians!  

Caroline Cabading, vocals Jonathan Bautista, saxophone Ben Luis, bass Harold Ohashi, drums Vince Khoe, keyboard Chris Planas, guitar $25 cover charge (cash at the door, please) Doors open at 7:20pm for the 7:30pm show. BYOB Reservations: Call 415-586-3733 Also streamed live on Bird & Beckett’s Facebook page and YouTube channel. If you like what you hear in the stream and stick around for more, donate to help us pay the musicians! The Autonomous Region plays kul jazz, putting a kulintang spin on jazz standards and original compositions. The group, led by vocalist Caroline Cabading, was founded in 2015 as the house band for the Club Mandalay, a pop-up jazz club in the International Hotel Manilatown Center on Kearny & Jackson Streets, just off Columbus Avenue, in San Francisco’s North Beach/Chinatown district. The Club Mandalay is a community-engagement project emphasizing family friendly and affordable live music, spoken word and dance presentations. …

Bird & Beckett features local poets with an open mic to follow on the first Thursday of every month. Jerry Ferraz and Michael Koch host. Fernando Martí is an Ecuadorian-born poet, printmaker, community architect, and activist based in San Francisco. He has been deeply involved in San Francisco’s struggles for affordable housing and the reclamation of the commons since the mid-90s, working with the Latinx immigrant diaspora of San Francisco’s Mission and Excelsior districts. His writing, illustrations, and altar ofrendas reflect his formal training in urbanism, his roots in rural Ecuador, and his current residence in the heart of Empire in an age of climate catastrophe. His work inhabits the space between ancestral traditions of place and the construction of a liberatory Latinx Futurism. He is a member of the Justseeds artists cooperative, and his writings have appeared in publications as varied as El Tecolote, Street Sheet, Geez Magazine, Milvia Street, and Shelterforce. _______________________________ Cyrus…

Drummer Vince Lateano leads the session with Peter Barshay on bass and Ben Stolorow on piano. A lot of great players have come out of San Francisco. Get in their number. Before the saints coming marching in! No fee to play. Audience, bring a $20 to help us pay the rhythm section. BYOB  

Also streamed live on Bird & Beckett’s Facebook page and YouTube channel. If you like what you hear in the stream, and stick around for more, donate!

Neil Adler is one of a handful of chromatic harmonica masters who have followed the great Toots Thielemans in the past six decades. A notoriously nuanced and difficult instrument, very few have invested their time and talents in taming the beast and making it sing as well as Neil. He’s been a guest harmonica artist in performances worldwide from Canada to Belgium and beyond, has received a standing ovation down in Half Moon Bay at the storied Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, is an endorser of Seydel Harmonicas. And yet, he’s an award-winning, Bay Area treasure known to just a lucky few…  You’ll be in their number tonight. Larry Dunlap is at the top of the heap of thousands upon thousands of talented pianists, with a storied career reaching back through the decades. Soloist, accompanist, composer, arranger, Larry’s profile is particularly high from his work with singers Bobbe Norris and…

Drummer Tony Johnson brings a fine quartet into Bird & Beckett on the fourth Friday of each month. He’s a 63-year veteran of the local jazz scene, still a supercharged, swinging dynamo behind the kit belying his 80+ years of age. Tony left his native Australia and arrived in San Francisco in 1959, and was immediately working the City’s fertile club scene in an era when crowds were jamming the the Hungry i, the Jazz Workshop, the Black Cat, El Matador and the Cellar in North Beach, the Black Hawk at Hyde & Turk in the Tenderloin, the Tradewinds out in the Richmond District, the Say When on Bush. Tony played locally in those years with the likes of guitarist Eddie Duran, bassist Ron Crotty, pianist Flip Nunez, sax player Pony Poindexter, vocalist Bev Kelly (and can be heard driving the quartet with Nunez and Poindexter on Kelly’s great lp…

Walker Brents is back from his summer rambles… to plumb the tale of the Johnson County Cattle War of 1892… live stream only… You can find the live stream on Bird & Beckett’s YouTube channel or Facebook page. Donate to support Walker and the stream.

Trumpeter Mario Guarneri enlists some of the best jazz minds of our place and time — Erik Jekabson (also on trumpet), Randy Vincent (guitar), John Wiitala (bass) and Akira Tana (drums) — to test the boundaries and depths of some of his compositions. Catch it in the live stream if you can’t make it to the shop, on the Bird & Beckett YouTube channel or Facebook page. Donate to help us pay the musicians!  

Eric Shifrin on piano and Paul Mehling on guitar co-lead a trio with bassist Dexter Williams grounding the whole affair, taking jazz on a spin through the French countryside with a generous number of  mischievous sidetracks. 5:30-7:00pm $20 cover charge; byob catch it in the live stream if you can’t make it to the shop, on the Bird & Beckett YouTube channel or Facebook page. Donate to help us pay the musicians!

Chicago percussionist and composer Tim Daisy has assembled a new quartet made up of some of the Bay Area’s finest musicians: Phillip Greenleaf on tenor saxophone,Kyle Bruckmann on electronics and double reeds;  and Lisa Mezzacappa on bass. The music consists of original compositions composed by both Tim and Kyle (who collaborated frequently when Kyle lived in Chicago in the early 2000s) and is inspired by many areas of experimental sound making including but not limited to free jazz, contemporary classical and noise. The new quartet will make its performance debut on Saturday August 20th at Bird & Beckett Books, on the eve of a recording session which is slated for release on Tim’s label Relay Recordings in 2023. $20 cover charge (cash please). Doors open at 7:20 for the 7:30 show. BYOB. You can find the live stream on Bird & Beckett’s YouTube channel or Facebook page. Donate to support…

Guitarist Scott Foster holds down the 3rd Friday slot at Bird & Beckett, bringing in a fresh project every time out, drawing from the stellar pool of jazz players that the San Francisco Bay Area can claim. Tonight, trumpeter Henry Hung steps up to pull a phat batch of pop hits into the jazz cauldron and discover what alchemical magic can be made. Bass & drums, tba. Audience? You, your neighbors and friends, current and prospective! $20 cover charge (cash please). Doors open at 7:20 for the 7:30 show. BYOB. You can find the live stream on Bird & Beckett’s YouTube channel or Facebook page. Donate to support the musicians and the stream! Come down to the shop for the best experience, or get a great taste of it in the live stream — to be found on Bird & Beckett’s YouTube channel and Facebook page. Don’t fail to donate…

Guitar legend John Stowell and master saxophonist Michael Zilber have enjoyed a fertile musical relationship stretching back two decades, including three critically-acclaimed cds on Origin Records. 2015’s “Basement Blues” was a Downbeat “Top CD of the Year.” Zilber and Stowell have performed numerous times together through the years at leading venues on both coasts, but the pandemic hit pause on this ongoing and fruitful collaboration. Their duo show at Bird & Beckett is the first opportunity to hear the two of them together in two and a half years. Zilber was declared “one of the true masters of modern jazz saxophone” by All About Jazz.  Stowell “plays his amplified guitar as if he were surrounded by fine crystal… (a) slow burning, sustained energy,” said Downbeat. More about both on  www.johnstowell.com and www.michaelzilber,com. $15 cover charge (cash, please); byob and a mask. Doors open 7:20 pm for the 7:30 first set.…

Anthony Blea, violin Bob Crawford, piano Mike Arnold, bass Annette A. Aguilar, drums $20 cover charge (cash please). Doors open at 7:20 for the 7:30 show. BYOB. You can find the live stream on Bird & Beckett’s YouTube channel or Facebook page. Donate to support the musicians and the stream! Hi-Octane Latin Jazz from some of the great practitioners of the art! Annette left San Francisco for New York at a young age thirty years ago, well grounded in the music since childhood — from family traditions and Mission District experience in an era when Santana, Azteca and Malo were shaping a sound that shook up the nation. Thirty years on, she’s a major force in the Latin music scene back East, hyper-active with her StringBeans, her annual festivals of women in Latin Jazz, her spontaneous street corner sets outside Bronx bodegas, her tireless work in the schools, her central…