653 Chenery Street
in San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood
1-415-586-3733
[email protected]
Open to walk-in trade and browsing
Tuesday to Sunday
noon to six
Live Streams every weekend!
Refresh your browser to catch a show in progress!
Visit our Facebook page or YouTube channel!
But nothing beats being in the room with the music & the musicians!
Henry Salvia, piano and vocals. Kathleen Salvia, vocals. Alex Baum, bass. Kenny Owen, drums. John Pearson, percussion. $25 cover charge; byob. reservations, 415-586-3733. Welcome to Henry’s Hideaway… it might be a dive on the Embarcadero, a concrete bunker or shaky wooden shack of a bar… maybe it’s the sixties, maybe the fifties… maybe it’s the forties… long before the freeway came down and the roller skaters came out. The dim light makes it impossible to discern the poisonous glow of doctored drinks, but no matter, love’s afoot, lust set loose, just enough… worry later, your cares are dead on arrival. Push open the squeaking door and join the party. It’s a tableau of friendly chaos, a population of denizens each with a story to tell, and everybody’s listening… Julie London, Ricky Ricardo, Joe Sample, Peggy Lee, a cat they call Laufey… they’re all there, as are you… The Flying Salvias… …
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Jean Fineberg, sax & flute. Marlina Teich, guitar. Carla Kaufman, bass. Joyce Baker, drums. $20 cover charge; byob. reservations, call 415-586-3733. “The warmly sensuous flow of music Marlina sends forth moves me into a groove I hate to leave when I go back to my day job.” – Nat Hentoff. Marlina Teich will be performing soulful and swinging jazz and Latin standards with her new quartet featuring Jean Fineberg on sax and flute, Carla Kaufman on upright bass, and Joyce Baker on drums. Guitarist/vocalist/bandleader Marlina Teich has been playing in hotels, clubs, bars and restaurants, as well as recording, in and around San Francisco for decades, also taking her music to hospitals, prisons, psychiatric institutions — anywhere the music can thrill, sooth and please! Saxophonist/flutist Jean Fineberg leads her own original music octet JAZZphoria. She has recorded on more than 40 albums, and can be heard on radio…
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Check our calendar for details on these events from mid-July to the end of August: Thursday 7/18 at 7pm, join filmmaker Abhijeet Paul and editor Rebecca Whittington for a screening of BHATTI, their Mohalla Film Colletive’s 29-minute documentary being readied for release, about the life of a 21st century potter family who make bhar, earthen teacups. in India. The clay teacups are used once, discarded, retrieved, remade and sent out again to the tea stalls in a generations-old cycle. Will this craft survive the onslaught of plastic cups, the No. 1 source of soil and marine pollution? Mohalla Films is returning to South Asia in late July 2024 to work on a narrative ecofilm, BISHTEL (POISON OIL) based on a short story by a marginal Muslim farmer and writer, Ansaruddin. The fillm shows Goni, a marginal farmer, fighting to keep his patch from getting contaminated by fertilizers and toxic sprays…
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Eric Shifrin, piano. Ollie Dudek, bass. Mark Lee, drums. $20 suggested donation per adult. Kids free. Teens and students – $5-$10 The In Crowd’s 2024 second Fridays residency is dedicated to the 20th century songwriters behind so many tunes we know as jazz standards. This month, it pleases Eric and his trio to spotlight the work of Jerome Kern and Frank Loesser. Jerome Kern (1885-1945) wrote 700 songs used in 100 musicals, including chestnuts like A Fine Romance, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, The Way You Look Tonight and All the Things You Are. Frank Loesser (1910-1969) is well loved for Baby It’s Cold Outside, Luck Be a Lady Tonight, Let’s Get Lost and Never Will I Marry. Eric Shifrin has been bringing the In Crowd into saloons and salons, dens and dives, high-toned places and low-down spaces, boites and ballrooms, clubs and concert halls for decades, and they never…
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Postcards to Hitler (Monthly Review Press, 2024) is San Francisco author Bruce Neuburger’s intimate and dramatic narrative history of Munich residents Benno and Anna Neuburger and their circle of relatives and friends. In the 1920s, Benno, Anna and their children lived as close neighbors to the demagogue who was to become the Nazi leader. A slow-moving horror show enveloped them in the years that followed. They reacted and were ultimately murdered, Benno tried in the Nazi’s “People’s Court” and executed, Anna “exterminated” in the concentration camp at Treblinka, Poland. Bruce Neuburger, Anna and Benno’s grandson, has written a deeply researched book drawn from family stories, interviews, and archival documents, including those from the Gestapo and the Nazi People’s Court. Postcards to Hitler follows the arc of history, from a “golden age” of Jewish accomplishment in Germany to the depth of mass murder. It is a portrayal of the rise of…
Read MoreKim Shuck, San Francisco Poet Laureate Emirtus, hosts poetry readings on Zoom twice a month. The second Monday of each month, there are featured readers followed by an open mic. The fourth Sunday of each month, it’s all open mic. Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84350265713?pwd=eE84V3BYdWxiSFBHNHhmdUt1WTUzdz09 Meeting ID: 843 5026 5713 Passcode: 244211 This month, the featured readers are Tehmina Khan and Tureeda Mikell. Tehmina Khan is a daughter of Indian immigrant scientists who has spent her adult life writing, teaching, resisting, and mothering. She has taught science to preschoolers, citizenship to octogenarians, and poetry translation to elementary school students; she now teaches College Writing at UC Berkeley and Interdisciplinary Studies at City College of San Francisco, where she defends everyone’s right to a quality education. Her work has been published in Poets11, Written Here, OccuPoetry, CCSF Forum Magazine, Civil Liberties United, The City is Already Speaking, Essential Truths, and Muslim American…
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Ray Skjelbred, piano Marc Caparone, trumpet Nathan Tokunaga, clarinet Jeff Hamilton, drums $20 cover charge; byob. Reservations, call 415-586-3733. Ray Skjelbred’s roots are in the early Chicago piano styles, with an affinity for the likes of Jess Stacy, Joe Sullivan, Jimmy Yancey and Art Hodes, not to mention a host of others from Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams and Thelonious Monk to more obscure players he can tell you much about, like Burt Bales, Zinky Cohn and George Zack. He’s a legend in the world of traditional jazz, frequently traveling the circuit from his base in Seattle. On this date, Marc and Jeff are long-time associates; just in his mid-teens, Nathan is someone Ray has only recently found to be more than amenable to his music. Read more on Ray at http://jazzhotbigstep.com Hear Ray play “Stompin’ em Down” at this link
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David Byrd, saxophone. Eli Goldlink, keyboards. Ollie Dudek, bass. Michael Spencer, drums. $20 cover charge; byob. Byrds of a Feather is an All-Star quartet with top ranking musicians, well loved and often heard in spots throughout Northern California, honoring the great jazz masters while doing it their own unique jazzreggae way. Besides its reggae inflection, Byrds of a Feather features leader David Byrd’s vocalese, upholding the grand tradition invented by Eddie Jefferson and made famous by King Pleasure and Jon Hendricks. Leader and saxophonist David Byrd hails from Chicago, and has been living in the Bay Area since 2012.
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Luke Westbrook, guitar. Matt Montgomery, bass. Smith Dobson, drums. $20 suggested cover for adults; Teens and music students, $5-10 sliding scale; kids free. Reservations, call the store at 415-586-3733. BYOB. This trio of musician friends has been performing together since 2007. These days the group plays repertoire mainly from the Great American Songbook (jazz standards) but every now and then you may hear something completely free or a choice pop tune from a bygone era. What makes the trio unique is the level of individual expressivity and musicianship that each player brings to the group. Guitarist Luke Westbrook’s years playing jazz, his serious inquiry into early Western polyphonic music and his affinity for the raw textural potential of acoustic and electric stringed instruments form the primary elements of his palette. Born in San Francisco in 1979, he began playing jazz early in the schools, participating in the Monterey Jazz Festival and…
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Drummer Vince Lateano, an MVP of the San Francisco jazz scene for decades, hosts a jam session at Bird & Beckett on the last Sunday of each month with Ben Stolorow on piano and Peter Barshay on bass, each uniquely talented and at home on our stage. If you want to hear that lovely trio without all the folks sitting in, you’ll need to plan to be here on the third Sunday of each month for their ongoing residency. The jam session always occupies that sweet spot between wonderful and vastly amusing. It needs your financial support if you can afford to be generous, as most of the seats are filled with players from whom no financial contribution is required, though we’re adamant about paying the trio. If you’ve been in the City thirty years (don’t call it Frisco!), you’ll remember Vince from Jazz at Pearl’s. Those with longer memories…
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Bassist and bandleader Dave Parker has been fielding highly charged ensembles in San Francisco for twenty years at least, picking and funding great musicians from the local pool to realize his vision. Featuring a strong, propulsive low end of trombone, baritone sax and bass, a cutting trumpet star, a virtuoso tenor sax player and supercharged drums and guitar, Dave’s septet digs deep into compositions by Mingus, Coleman, Coltrane, Dolphy and Morgan and isn’t shy to assay a Bach fugue. Long-time Glen Park residents will remember the smaller, but equally hard hitting combos Dave squeezed into the Red Rock Lounge and then Le P’tit Laurent on Friday nights starting two decades ago, and thousands of City dwellers and tourists have heard his bands at farmer’s markets and a variety of breweries, restaurants and clubs through the years. Once or twice a year, Dave brings the group into Bird & Beckett. It’s…
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Coming up this weekend: The Dave Parker Septet – 6/29, 7:30pm. Jam Session – 6/30, 5:00pm. Dave Parker brings his seven piece pile-driving chamber jazz band for a deep plunge into music by Mingus, Coltrane, Dolphy, Morgan, Coleman and Johann Sebastian Bach. Dave is a Medici when it comes to supporting the cats in his band. We would prefer socialism, but it’s not up to us. We do love the music and the musicians! Henry Hung on trumpet, Charles Hamilton on trombone, Hal Richards on tenor sax, Cory Wright on bari sax, Karl Evangelista on guitar, Valentino Peeps on drums… and Dave on bass, conceiving the approach, the band, the set list. The arrangements are arrived at in mutuality through the complicated process that jazz can be and the results are grand! Those of you who have been in the neighborhood more than twenty years may remember that before there…
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Joanna Mack, sitar, and Ferhan Qureshi, tabla, will be playing Raga in a traditional style – improvised music based on decades of classical training. This show will also be available on live stream, however, the focus will be toward the people in the room, so please come in person if you can! $20 cover charge; byob. To reserve a seat, please call the bookshop at 415-586-3733. Joanna Mack began her study of Indian Classical sitar in 1997. She spent eight years in Kolkata studying under Pandit Deepak Choudhury, and returned to the U.S. where she has had the honor to study under Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Sarodia Bruce Hamm and Sangeet Research Academy Guru Partha Chatterjee. She has been teaching and performing since 2006. Read more at JoannaMack.com Ferhan Najeeb Qureshi is a disciple of the legendary tabla maestro, Ustad Tari Khan. Prior to the training he continues to receive…
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Drummer Benny Amón left California, born & raised in Davis and trained in jazz, for New Orleans — where he lived and played for the ten years from 2011 to 2021, and where his love for the oldest jazz traditions was nurtured and flowered. In New Orleans, Benny performed regularly at Preservation Hall, Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro, The Palm Court Jazz Cafe, and aboard the Steamboat Natchez. Along the way, he has toured the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Japan, Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Sweden, performing in clubs and at jazz festivals that have included the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the Monterey Jazz Festival, Festival international I LOVE JAZZ in Brazil and the New Mexico Jazz Festival. Benny is currently a Teaching Artist with the Preservation Hall Foundation and the Jazz In Schools program at Jazz at Lincoln Center. In the Bay Area, he regularly leads his own…
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Tenor saxophonist James Mahone gained a substantial and eminently well earned reputation as a co-founder of the jazz ensemble Black/Note, which won first prize at the John Coltrane Young Artist Competition in 1991 and recorded albums on World Stage (43rd and Degnan, 1991) Red Records (L.A. Underground, 1994), Columbia (Jungle Music, 1994) and Impulse (Nothin’ But the Swing, 1996). Black/Note had its roots in the jazz program at Cal State Northridge, where Mahone was studying alongside bassist Mark Anthony (Marcus) Shelby. In 1990, Shelby learned of Billy Higgins’ World Stage in Leimert Park, which had open jam sessions where Shelby met trumpeter Richard Grant. Black/Note, with Shelby, Grant, Mahone and drummer Willie Jones III, grew out of these sessions. They had their first gig as a unit in 1991. Among Black/Note’s first pianists were Eric Reed and Kenneth Crouch, but when they recorded a live date, released as 43rd and…
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Your donation to the Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project helps us pay for a multitude of operating expenses necessary to present, promote and preserve local music, poetry, and more.
Help us keep the arts alive and thriving!
The Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project was created in 2007 "to present, document and archive the creative work of significant living writers and musicians in the San Francisco Bay Area, for a neighborhood audience and future generations." We've been doing that very thing for more than a decade and a half, continuing the work we began when the store was established in 1999.
We continue to present a full slate of programming of live music and poetry readings, and produce a literary journal and poetry chapbooks, and we seek and welcome your continued financial support by way of donations through our fiscal sponsor, Jazz in the Neighborhood.
Click on "donate" in the navigation bar above. Better yet, send or drop off a check made out to our fiscal sponsor, Jazz in the Neighborhood, with BBCLP in the memo line. Our mailing address is:
Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project
653 Chenery Street
San Francisco, CA 94131
Call us at (415) 586-3733 to find out how else you might lend your support.
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The Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project
Our events are put on under the umbrella of the Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project (the "BBCLP"). That's how we fund our ambitious schedule of 300 or so concerts and literary events every year.
The BBCLP is a [Read More ]
The Independent Musicians Alliance
Gigging musicians! You have nothing to lose but your lack of a collective voice to achieve fair wages for your work!
The IMA can be a conduit for you, if you join in to make it work.
https://www.independentmusiciansalliance.org/
Read more here - Andy Gilbert's Feb 25 article about the IMA from KQED's site
