Poetry – Fiction – Jazz x5

Tuesday, January 27, 7:00pm: Nellie Wong Memorial Reading [Poetry reading] {free}
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Thursday, January 29, 5:30pm: Novelists Tara Dorabji & Betty Shamieh moderated by Sabina Khan-Ibarra [Author Event] {free}
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Friday, January 30, 8:30pm: Vaughn Cannon Quartet {$20}.

 

 

 

 

 

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Saturday, January 31, 5:30pm: Erik Jekabson Quintet {$20}.
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Saturday, January 31, 7:30pm: Dawn Lambeth w/ Marc Caparone, Mikiya Matsuda & Jeff Hamilton  {$20}
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Sunday, February 1, 5:00pm: Next Gen Jam w/ Urban High School Bebop Combo {$}
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Sunday, February 1, 7:30pm: Craig Handy Quartet featuring Sylvia Cuenca {$20}

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Scroll down for details!

Reserve a seat by calling the bookshop at (415) 586-3733. We’ll hold your reservation until the music starts. No advance ticket sales; plan to pay with cash at the door, and byob.

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~~~Five great jazz dates Friday to Sunday!~~~
All great!
Details below!
Call for a reservation: 415-586-3733.
~~~byob and a twenty for the band!~~~

Friday, January 30th – 8:30pm
$20 cover / students $10
Vaughn Cannon Quartet
Vaughn Cannon, guitar; Kevin Person, piano;
Alan Jones, bass; Sheldon Alexander, drums
Vaughn’s newest album, Nana Needs New Glasses, unpacks a personal reflection of his Armenian heritage and lived experiences through his complex jazz arrangements of traditional Armenian folk songs mixed with his own style. These arrangements, combined with his original compositions, provide a contemplative, melancholic and spirited journey through jazz.

 

Saturday, January 31st – 5:30pm
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS SHOW WAS ORIGINALLY ANNOUNCED FOR FRIDAY AT 6PM
$20 cover / students $10 / kids free
Erik Jekabson Quintet:
A Tale of Three Cities
Erik Jekabson, trumpet;
Kasey Knudsen, alto sax;
Matt Clark, piano;
John Wiitala, bass; Jeff Marrs, drums
Erik’s done time in New Orleans, New York and San Francisco
and has the compositions to prove it! And a fine quintet to play them!

Saturday, January 31st – 7:30pm
$20 cover / students $10
Dawn Lambeth w/ the Caparone / Hamilton Trio
Dawn Lambeth, vocals; Marc Caparone, trumpet; Jeff Hamilton, piano
Dawn and Marc are driving up from the Central Coast to play with long-time friend Jeff Hamilton. She sings jazz standards with elan, and Marc is an effortlessly swinging trumpeter. As for Jeff, he’s long been known as the top trad jazz drummer on the coast, but has a great affinity for the piano and a complex harmonic sense that he’s displayed on many Bird & Beckett dates in the past dozen years. This show will be a treat.

Sunday, February 1st – 5:00pm
pay what you can to help us showcase young jazz talent
Next Gen Jam w/ Urban High School Bebop Combo
Thanks to Jazz in the Neighborhood for their support of this monthly series!
The Urban High School Bebop Combo performs a set, then hosts this month’s student-centric jam session.
Urban’s jazz program has produced innumerable fine players, and continues to do so.

 

Sunday, February 1st – 7:30pm
$20 cover charge / byob. Students $10.
Craig Handy Quartet
Craig Handy, tenor sax; Matt Clark, piano; Billy Edward, bass; Sylvia Cuenca, drums
Craig is a phenomenal jazz talent; an Oakland native, based in New York City. He’s had a long bandstand history with Sylvia forged in New York over the past few decades. Matt Clark is among the very best pianists on the coast, and young Billy Edwards has been taking the jazz scene by storm in just a few short years. The quartet’s sets Sunday night will be electrifying.

 

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49 people, standing room only:
Tuesday, January 27, 7:00pm
Nellie Wong Memorial Reading
Nellie Wong (born September 12, 1934; died January 2, 2026) emerged as a brilliant poet with a lifelong commitment to radical feminism and socialist politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Born and raised in Oakland’s Chinatown at 723 Webster Street, she worked in her parents’ neighborhood restaurant throughout her youth, graduated from Oakland High School (sixth oldest high school in California and the oldest high school in Oakland, whose alumni include Julia Morgan, Gertrude Stein, Jack London, (Nellie, 1952), David Carradine, Ben Fong-Torres, Shirley Fong-Torres, Sheila E and Boots Riley), found secretarial work at Bethlehem Steel and, on Bethlehem’s dime, enrolled at San Francisco State University in the early 1970s, where her insight and vision, already acute, were fully activated. There, she joined Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party, remaining active in both until her death. Students at Oakland High voted to name a building on the campus for Nellie in 2010. In her writing career, Nellie was published in the anthology This Bridge Called My Back and there have been five collections of her work to date: Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park (1977), The Death of Long Steam Lady (1984), Stolen Moments (1997), Breakfast Lunch Dinner (2012) and Nothing Like Freedom (2024, on her 90th birthday), with a posthumous collection in the works. Poet, artist, activist, Nellie was an icon, a neighbor and a friend. Read a moving profile of Nellie written by her brother, the journalist William (Bill) Gee Wong at this link  and listen to Nellie herself describe her youth and development in this interview.   Tonight’s reading features Genny Lim and Flo Oy Wong, The Hoisan Poets, with the Del Sol Quartet; Kim Shuck, Robert Rubino, Alice Rogoff, Clara Hsu, Bill Vartnaw, devorah major and Gail Mitchell; organized by Kim Shuck and co-sponsored by the San Francisco Public Library.

 

Thursday, January 29, 5:30pm
Tara Dorabji & Betty Shamieh, moderated by Sabina Khan-Ibarra.
Both writers live close by the bookshop; both have won acclaim for their debut novels (Call Her Freedom by Dorabji and Too Soon by Shamieh). Both novels were published in hardcover by Simon & Schuster in the spring of 2025 and are newly released by S&S in paperback, which occasions this joint author event.
Their individual paths to their novels are just that–individual, their successes distinct and at the same time parallel.
Dorabji has won acclaim for her documentary series Kashmir Speaks on human rights defenders in Kashmir, which won awards at over a dozen film festivals throughout Asia and the USA, including the Jaipur International Film Festival. Dorabji’s novel, Call Her Freedom, winner of Simon & Schuster’s Books Like Us Grand Prize, is a profoundly moving and beautifully detailed account of three generations of women in a fictional Central Asian country not unlike Kashmir, living harrowing lives with resolve and emotional strength in the crosshairs of occupying nations not unlike India and Pakistan, in the shadow cast by gender and class imbalances.
Shamieh has written a dozen plays, more than half of which have been produced in New York. Her novel, Too Soon, has just won the California Independent Booksellers Association’s (CALIBA) Golden Poppy Award. It draws on Shamieh’s Palestinian-American upbringing and her professional life as a playwright to relate a brilliant intergenerational story of a theater director’s professional, cultural and political arc in theatre, rooted in her grandmother’s and mother’s histories, from Ramallah to Jaffa, to Detroit, to San Francisco and New York, to Gaza, resilient but impacted by patriarchal norms.
Both are remarkable books.