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!

Thursday, October 5th – 7pm
Poets Gail Mitchell and Bill Vartnaw
with an open mic to follow

Gail Mitchell is a poet living in San Francisco. Bill Vartnaw is a poet living in Petaluma. Both are long-experienced and long associated coming out of the 1970s poetic ferment that yielded a path for voices of diverse American cultures, much of it captured in print by Bill’s Taurean Horn Press — including Gail’s title, Bone Songs. Bill himself is an eloquent poet and an invaluable chronicler of the artists whose voices enrich the region’s culture.

An open mic follows, hosted by Jerry Ferraz and Michael Koch, themselves products of overlapping scenes, venues and personal histories with common roots.

A word about Jerry. A child of San Francisco’s Eureka Valley, hard by the Castro District, Burmese by blood and American by upbringing, he took to wandering the city at a young age, drifting on the San Francisco fog through the 1960s, through the Haight, North Beach, the Mission, traveling a million miles through the years without ever leaving the city limits. By the time we opened the bookshop in 1999, he had been composing poetry and songs for nearly 40 years, enigmatic, allusive and mythic. The first poetry reading in the shop had Jerry at its center. He’s been at once hard to pin down and solid as a rock all these years. Now that his mother Billie has passed, a remarkable woman, he’s about to break loose of his home ground and head north to the Portland area, where he has a grown son. We’ll miss him, but imagine he’ll never really be gone.

Jerry Ferraz

Jerry FerrazSeptember 17, 2023Bird & Beckett Books San FranciscoPlease like and subscribe/follow for notifications!New to the channel/page? Check out our Featured Tunes playlist to get a sample of the musicians that regularly play at B&B. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfk23AYKsDp3oVvpiaLH6qCWbsrR3NKT1Presented by the nonprofit Bird and Beckett Cultural Legacy Project. We are a small independent bookstore in San Francisco with weekend live streams of incredible traveling and local musicians. Revive the joy and wonder of experiencing live music. Just great musicians playing live, innovating, with an engaging audience. Join the fun.Like the show LIVE or watching after the performance? Please Donate! Our small in-person venue and determination to pay the musicians a decent wage requires outside patrons and donations to be able to sustain these programs. Our cover charge is usually $20 and we recommend a $10 for live stream audience members. All donations go directly to putting on these shows. If you are a regular, consider an automatic monthly donation. It really helps. B&B Donations page: https://birdbeckett.com/join/the-cultural-legacy-project/Other Links:Events Calendar: https://bit.ly/42IHhMZWrite-ups on upcoming shows: https://birdbeckett.com/For best experience use headphones/earbuds or smartTV (youtube app) with soundbar/surround sound system. Hear the bass!Join us in-person if you are in town. BYOB. Great music, great community, great craic. Experience and Support Live Music! Good for the Head. Good for the Soul.Bird & Beckett, San Franciscohttps://birdbeckett.com/#livemusic #livejazz #birdandbeckett

Posted by Bird & Beckett Books on Sunday, September 17, 2023

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The Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project

Our events are put on under the umbrella of the nonprofit 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 501(c)(3) non-profit...
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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

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