Two dissenting sisters, estranged, entrenched in their positions, every bit as emotional and polarized as counter-demonstrators yelling at each other outside an Israeli embassy.  Leslie Simon reads from her new novel The Divine Comic (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020) on Saturday, September 26th at 2pm. Please RSVP at tinyurl.com/divinecomicRSVP to receive the zoom link for the reading.  

Born in Manhasset, New York, pianist David Udolf moved to the Bay Area in early 1991. A sought after sideman, he has played with Terri Bryant of the Fifth Dimension, saxophonist Herb Geller, R&B legend Bo Diddley, and toured nationally for six years with San Francisco’s own legendary New Pickle Circus. Local artists he has worked or recorded with include: Jules Broussard, vocalists Opie Bellas (with whom he did a concert tour of South Africa), Sherri Roberts, Lavay Smith, Diane Witherspoon and Kenny Washington, Hal Stein, trumpeter Warren Gale and the Joe Henderson Memorial Big Band. David has worked extensively with vocalist Mary Stallings, performing at international festivals and concert venues in Switzerland, Prague, Melbourne, and Tel Aviv as her accompanist and music director. Bassist Ron Belcher played or recorded with such international stars as Branford Marsalis, Regina Carter, Rodney Franklin, John Handy, and Pete Escovedo, as well as a…

Brandon Farmer, Drums Curtis Aikens, Bass Kai Lyons, Guitar Noah Frank, Trumpet Sueños is a high energy group fusing jazz with elements from hip-hop, R&B, gospel, neo-soul and indie rock in tunes penned by trumpeter Noah Frank, improvising and exploring as they go. View the live stream on our YouTube channel or our Facebook page. Jazz in the Neighborhood’s Guaranteed Fair Wage Fund helps us meet a $600 guarantee for the quartet this evening, and your contributions during the live stream do the rest of the work! Thanks for supporting local professional musicians playing world class music. Donate by PayPal or Venmo at this link – https://www.tinyurl.com/Donate-B-and-B www.suenosjazz.com   suggested cover charge — $20 sliding scale — $2 to $200 Support live music & the musicians who play it!  Use the links below: Take in the show on YouTube  or  Facebook Pay your cover charge / make your donation Subscribe…

The Scott Foster Trio explores music associated with the finest guitar trios through the years. Scott Foster, guitar Matt Montgomery, bass Omar Aran, drums       suggested cover charge — $20 sliding scale — $2 to $200 Support live music & the musicians who play it!  Use the links below: Take in the show on YouTube  or  Facebook Pay your cover charge / make your donation Subscribe to our YouTube channel Subscribe to our newsletter Bird & Beckett pays a guaranteed fair wage of $150 per musician and supplements it as your donations allow. That will take some heavy lifting on your part, but heavy makes you happy. That said, if you’re struggling in these tough times, we want you to keep your wallet in your pocket. The show is on us & your friends in the cyberstream!

Stephanie Woodford, piano and vocals Curtis Aikens, bass Noah Frank, drums The Stephanie Woodford Trio plays a blend of original music and covers, focusing on Black-American music from old school to contemporary. Stephanie’s original songs touch on themes of police brutality and discrimination. Scroll down for links to the stream on YouTube and facebook. suggested cover charge — $20 sliding scale — $2 to $200 Support live music & the musicians who play it!  Use the links below: Take in the show on YouTube  or  Facebook Pay your cover charge / make your donation Subscribe to our YouTube channel Subscribe to our newsletter Bird & Beckett pays a guaranteed fair wage of $150 per musician and supplements it as your donations allow. That will take some heavy lifting on your part, but heavy makes you happy. And if you’re struggling in these tough times, the show is on us &…

Delusion, Poetry, and Truth…one of many possible groups of three…here as we grapple with conglomerations of accumulated folly, as democratic citizens often do…Actually, we know the ways of each one, as they transform in and out of each other:  delusion, poetry, and truth.  The art of thinking for one’s self:  the imperative of radical sincerity, even amidst the influencing and conditioning. Informed by all we hold true, in what we learn to understand.  Laura Riding Jackson’s articulations offer us guidance and suggestions as we make our way forward through such perplexities as our times throw before us… suggested donation — $20 Use the links below: Take in Walker’s talk on YouTube  or  Facebook Make your donation Subscribe to our YouTube channel Subscribe to our newsletter

Neeli Cherkovski will hang out on the bookshop’s stage to chat with you one-on-one, at a polite social distance, fully masked, for five minutes or so at a time, about his re-released Bukowski bio, his book of conversations with the legendary poet & drummer Clark Coolidge and his own latest poetry collection, Hang on to the Yangtze River (Lithic Press, 2020). Neeli is an internationally respected poet, author of more that twenty books, who has traveled widely, having given readings in Mexico, Italy and a number of other countries. Translations of several of his books have been brought out by presses in several countries.  His papers are at The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.  He is now completing a new edition of his essential collection of “memoir-esque” essays on twelve key poets, Whitman’s Wild Children.  He has a thousand stories from a storied life in poetry. Third Mind Books of Ann Arbor,…

The Eli Maliwan Trio consists of Eli on Tenor Saxophone, Curtis Aikens on Upright Bass, and Kai Lyons on Electric Guitar. These three musicians and friends have played together in various projects and in different combinations over the years and their deep musical communication has developed into a unique and personal sound. The trio will be performing jazz standards. Kai Lyons has played with Big Chief Donald Harrison, drummer Mike Clark from Herbie Hancock Headhunters, organist Will Blades, and pianist Larry vuckovich. Studied jazz with Mulgrew Miller, Harold Mabern, Vincent Herring, Rich Perry, and Gene Bertoncini at William Paterson University outside of New York City. He frequently travels to Cuba, New Orleans, New York City, and Brazil, and has studied music in Ghana Africa Bassist and Composer Curtis Aikens is a versatile musician who has worked in a variety of settings including theater pits, orchestras, folk, rock and hip hop…

  Hop on our live stream to funky soulville Todd Swenson leads the band Marc Levine on bass Larry Vann on drums   suggested cover charge — $20 sliding scale — $2 to $200 Support live music & the musicians who play it!  Use the links below: Take in the show on YouTube  or  Facebook Pay your cover charge / make your donation Subscribe to our YouTube channel Subscribe to our newsletter Bird & Beckett pays a guaranteed fair wage of $150 per musician and supplements it as your donations allow. That will take some heavy lifting on your part, but heavy makes you happy. That said, if you’re struggling in these tough times, we want you to keep your wallet in your pocket. The show is on us & your friends in the cyberstream!  

All day long Monday, in eleven 30-minute sets, professional Bay Area jazz musicians take the bookshop stage in duos, trios and quartets!  All live streamed to you via YouTube & Facebook. Scroll down for the schedule! The show will be at its best when you have a large screen and nice speakers in play, but if you’re out hiking or picnicking in the parks, catch it on your phone! Celebrate Labor Day and honor the musicians that make jazz their job! The Independent Musician’s Alliance is guaranteeing each individual musician $50 per set for their work, and we hope you’ll stake us to that with your donations via PayPal (https://www.tinyurl.donate-b-and-b) or using the Venmo app on your smartphone (sending to @birdandbeckett). It’s just a small payday in a time when unemployment is rampant and gigs are scarce. But it’s potentially larger depending on your ability to be generous in these…

Bassist Charles Thomas plays jazz, soul, funk, reggae, classical — anything you could want. All of it with consummate skill, exuberance and expressive beauty.  At Bird & Beckett, Charles plays jazz. He’s been heard from our stage countless times, most often in the company of drummers Mark Lee and the late Jimmy Ryan and pianist Grant Levin.  Tonight, for our live stream on YouTube and facebook, he leads a solid trio featuring pianist Greg Jacobs and drummer Mark Lee, reprising a trio we heard here back in 2017. Guaranteed to please.   suggested cover charge — $20 sliding scale — $2 to $200 Support live music & the musicians who play it!  Use the links below: Take in the show on YouTube  or  Facebook Pay your cover charge / make your donation Subscribe to our YouTube channel Subscribe to our newsletter Bird & Beckett pays a guaranteed fair wage of…

Darren Johnston  / Adam Shulman / Lorca Hart         trumpet / piano / drums   Jazz in San Francisco Live streamed from Bird & Beckett Thursday, September 3rd – 7:30 pm suggested cover charge — $20 sliding scale — $2 to $200 Support live music & the musicians who play it!  Use the links below: Take in the show on YouTube  or  Facebook Pay your cover charge / make your donation Subscribe to our YouTube channel Subscribe to our newsletter Bird & Beckett pays a guaranteed fair wage of $150 per musician and supplements it as your donations allow.   * * * * * * * *   Musicians you’ve heard at Bird & Beckett, and many, many musicians you’ve never heard here, are busking in the parks, on the Embarcadero and in countless other public spaces to share their music with each other and with…

  Scott R. Looney, piano André Custodio, drums explore the boundaries of jazz in duo interplay, drawing inspiration from bop and avant traditions.  Use the links below to view & listen, and to help us pay the musicians. Take in the show on YouTube or Facebook Pay your “cover charge” – i.e., donate! $1-$200 sliding scale $10-20 suggested               Scott R. Looney studied composition and improvisation with Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Morton Subotnick and Frederic Rzewski, obtaining his MFA in Composition from California Institute of the Arts. He’s forged a signature style using the inside and outside of the piano, plucking strings, using metal implements and other quick preparations, in combination with playing the piano in conventional ways. Scott has recorded and/or performed with a growing list of world class improvisers: Wolfgang Fuchs, Jon Raskin (of the ROVA Saxophone Quartet), Henry Kaiser, Gianni Gebbia, Gino…

Songwriter Maurice Tani with his duo partner, the American bassist Mike Anderson, return to the Bird & Beckett stage for a program of his classic songs and some new ones. Maurice has been called a “cartographer of the human heart” (Scott Bloom, in The Bay Twang), and we think that sums it up pretty well. His record company, Little Village Foundation, spells it out: “Known for his wry/rye-to-romantic songwriting, agile guitar style and expressive singing, Tani’s particular flavor of Americana is a broad spectrum tincture of influences to cure what ails you. While rooted (at times distantly) in country music, his writing is centered on an urban-western perspective. Short musical narratives of life on the left coast. A sort of cinema for the blind.” Our live streams are now accessed on both YouTube and Facebook. Suggested cover charge: $20 / sliding scale – $2 to $200 Support live music &…

Walker Brents continues his exploration of the work of the great French-Algerian writer and philosopher, Albert Camus, author of novels including The Stranger, The Plague and The Fall, the short story volume Exile and the Kingdom and numerous plays, as well as key essay collections The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel and Algerian Chronicles. Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. Suggested cover charge: $10 / sliding scale – $1 to $100 Use the links below: Take in Walker’s talk on YouTube or Facebook Pay your cover charge Subscribe to our YouTube channel Subscribe to our newsletter