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!
While we finalize another fistful of posts on upcoming events, here’s a little round up of the next two weekends. You can always click on the “Events Calendar” link in the navigation bar above to see what’s on tap going forward. Full posts on the next eight or ten events coming soon where you can get all the detail you crave! But for now, we can tell you that on the weekend starting out Friday 9/20 with Scott Foster + the Lost Trio doing Monk’s Works, you’ll also hear Beth Custer and David James’ project called Russian Telegraph on Saturday the 21st & Slug Teacher with Dave Tidball and Galen Grant on Sunday the 22nd at 2pm followed by the Rick Brown Quartet featuring Grant Levin at 4:30… Thursday 9/26, you’ll hear a reading by poets Mark Statman and Arturo Mantecon, then Denise Perrier with the 230 Jones Street on…
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Lenore Weiss reads poems from Barcelona and Prague, and flash fiction from her chapbook, “Holding on to Fringes of Love.” Sharon Doubiago reads from her recent works, Naked to the Earth and The Visit. Lenore Weiss’ poetry collections are a trilogy about love, loss, and being mortal: Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island (West End Press, 2012); Two Places (Kelsay Books, 2014), and The Golem (Hadassa Word Press, 2017). In addition, she has published a collection of flash fiction and a children’s story, “The Glimmerine.” Lenore tutors middle-school and high-school students in reading and writing and volunteers at Chapter510 in Oakland, California Her blog can be found at www.lenoreweiss.com. Sharon Doubiago is a prolific writer of memoir and poetry, whose latest books are Naked to the Earth, “a wide-ranging, lyrical, jarring, playful, elegiac, dissonant, amazing quest to understand who we are and how we became who we are…”…
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Todd Swenson, guitar Derek Evans, vocals Ian Ratzer, pianoPaul Olguin, bass Justin Berthiaume, drums The best time you could imagine on this Sunday afternoon! ’tis true!
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Chuck Poling, country & bluegrass raconteur incomparable, delivers a personal history of a Precita Park childhood in the 1960s and ‘70s through spoken word and song, with an able assist from his wife, Jeanie. In a journey that took him from Catholic school and kickball to rock stars and revolution, Chuck was just a kid trying to make sense out of it all. He credits his always-in-play gift of gab with helping him avoid trouble from larger, tougher schoolchildren, or pretty much everybody. The longer he kept them laughing, the more likely he was to keep his lunch money. Chuck was born and raised and stubbornly continues to reside, with Jeanie, in San Francisco. He spent his childhood years living on Precita Park and now lives in the Inner Richmond. As a marketing professional, he’s worked for iconic San Francisco institutions including the Chronicle and the Gap. Chuck is also…
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Noel Jewkes, reeds Grant Levin, piano Charles Thomas, bass Rick Rivera, drums
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The classic sound of the Hammond B3 organ trio… Wayne de la Cruz, organ Ray Scott, guitar Jim Chanteloup, drums
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$20 cover charge; sliding scale available. Dan Barrett, trombone Jeff Hamilton, piano Clint Baker, bass Jessica King, vocals In Jeff Hamilton and Clint Baker, we’ve got two of the key trad jazz instrumentalists on the West Coast. Jeff is widely known as an impeccably swinging drummer, and we love him madly as a pianist. Clint wears plenty of hats — a fantastic trumpet player, a fabulous bassist, a charming vocalist, a musicologist with vast stores of knowledge, a KCSM disc jockey, the list goes on! A jazz guru, he’s been called… Born and raised in Southern California, Dan Barrett began playing the trombone at the age of eleven, and the cornet shortly thereafter. In high school he formed his first group, the Back Bay Jazz Band, a sextet focused on the music of King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton and other early jazz greats. During this time, Dan played many jobs…
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3rd year! Students in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s “Roots, Jazz & American Music” Bachelor’s degree in music program host their peers from Bay Area colleges and high schools on the second Monday of each month. Hear the fantastic talent of young musicians drawn from all over the country, and indeed, the world, as they blaze through the bebop and plumb gorgeous ballads plucked from the Great American Songbook… There’s no limit to the talent and the tradition, no fear of the future, in these kids. Catch them while they’re perfecting their craft, growing before your ears! After 100 years as a strictly classical (broad as that may be) institution of higher education, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music brought in pianist and educator Simon Rowe in 2016 to create, develop and direct its foray into jazz education. The first freshman class arrived in the fall of 2017 and…
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Marvin Leon Achyutan Pattillo grew up in Kansas City but now lives in Oakland. He’s played with “a lot of beautiful people,†he says, including John Coltrane. Achyutan joined Local 627 of the AFM, the Kansas City black musicians union, when he was 13, after getting a gig at the famous Orchid Room at 12th and Vine – his band played on Sunday nights, when the venue didn’t sell alcohol so youngsters could play. As he got older, Pattillo played in Frank Smith’s legendary Kansas City trio and toured with Texas bluesman Eddie Cleanhead Vinson. “But,†he says, “you couldn’t go in the hotels and play. There was Johnny Baker’s, where I played with Jay McShann, out on Troost. That was a white club but had a black band in it. After we would take our intermissions we would have to go down in the basement. But the people who…
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Aural Monsoon is a trio ensemble seeded by inaugural conjunction of first notes. To paraphrase Cecil Taylor find a note you like and conjunct it with another that then ignites spontaneous aural intelligence. Subconscious harmony then transpires amongst the sound magicians at hand, which results in the immediate aural field igniting by means of the unpredictable. This being not unlike the early Paris drawings of Joan Miro where immediate praxis subsumed all cultural super-imposition. —Will Alexander A bit more from Will: https://entropymag.org/translucence-as-superior-distillation/
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$20 cover charge; sliding scale available. Charlie McCarthy, tenor sax and flute Michael Greensill, piano John Clark, bass Jack Dorsey, drums Consummate musicians and good friends playing jazz standards with decades of experience.
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$20 suggested donation; contribute only what you can Q.R. Hand     Nina Serrano     Thomas Stanton Three distinguished poets perform short solo sets and together perform an unpublished piece by Diane di Prima LITANY  (FOR KATHY ACKER) Di Prima, a native New Yorker born in August 1934, emerged as a central voice, intellect and organizing figure among the 1950s Beat era literary figures, and moved with the times, changing coasts along the way, through the revolutionary 1960s and the emerging consciousness of the 1970s. Her major work of the ’70s, Loba, and her exploration of magick, esoteric and hermetic traditions found public expression in the Poetrics program she co-founded in 1980 at New College of California with fellow poets Robert Duncan and David Meltzer and the San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts (SIMHA), where she taught Western spiritual traditions into…
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$20-25 suggested donation; contribute only what you can. Tonight, the great San Francisco singer Denise Perrier joins the band! Oop Bop Sh’Bam plays jazz from the traditions of New Orleans, Chicago, New York and San Francisco each 1st Friday in September, October & November, and March, April & May. Mark your calendar! Al Molina, trumpet Jerry Logas, reeds & vocal Larry Chinn, piano Dean Reilly, bass Vince Lateano, drums with special guest Denise Perrier, vocals Vocalist Denise Perrier was born in Louisiana, and moved with her family to the Bay Area at the age of five. She’s had a thirty-year career performing locally and touring Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Along the way, she’s been dubbed “The Voice with a Heart.â€Â Jazz Times magazine reviewer Harvey Siders — speaking of the record she recorded with sax legend Houston Person and Tammy Hall on piano — noted that “Ms Perrier boasts a gorgeous…
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$20 cover/sliding scale available. Lyle Link, saxophone Brian Ho, organ Mike Scott, guitar Lorca Hart, drums Lorca Hart grew up in Taos, New Mexico in a musical family. He was exposed to a variety of instruments and musical styles as a child but early on it became clear that the drumset was his passion. In high school he started to perform and focus on Jazz. He attended California Institute of the Arts from 1992-96, studying with Albert “Tootie†Heath, Joe La Barbera, Charlie Haden, Wadada Leo Smith, and many others. Since that time Lorca has worked consistently in a variety of musical situations, performing with many of the West Coast’s (and beyond) finest artists including : Bobby Hutcherson, Stanley Jordan, Ralph Moore, Carmen Lundy, Freddie Hubbard, Calvin Keys, Craig Handy, Kyle Eastwood, Herman Riley, Azar Lawrence, Red Holloway, Plas Johnson, John Heard, Danny Grissett, Justo Almario, Bennie Maupin, Phil Ranelin,…
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$20 cover charge/sliding scale available. Practitioner, the duo of Ben Goldberg and Michael Coleman, explores the music of Steve Lacy. Their first cd came complete with a set of jazzball cards! What’s not to like? This time out, they drill one right through the gap into the outfield that is Lacy’s Book of H! Says Michael, “We’ll be playing the mysterious and quixotic Book of H by Steve Lacy. We’ve been working on this music for 5 years (!!) and it just keeps getting hazier. A dream come true.” Take a stroll through Ben’s discography at this link. Pay particular attention to the graphic at the top, and when you get to the same graphic as an album cover, well then take a minute and “read more.” I mean click on through and read the whole thing. Then you’ll have a pretty good feel for how Ben feels about Steve…
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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," 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.
Click on "donate" in the navigation bar above. Better yet, make a check out to the “Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project” and drop it off or mail it to:
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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We're immensely appreciative of Jazz in the Neighborhood for having stepped in as our temporary fiscal sponsor for a few months, while we straightened out some paperwork to get nonprofit status restored to the BBCLP. We're happy to say that's been done, and all past, present, and future donations made directly to the BBCLP are fully tax-deductible!
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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
