The 1980s were formative years for Ron Jackson, studying guitar at Berklee School of Music, spending two years in Paris picking up the electric bass, returning to New York and the jazz guitar in 1987 and touring North America and Europe. In 1991, at age 27, he released his debut album as a leader, “A Guitar Thing,” with collaborators including Benny Green, Lonnie Plaxico and Cecil Brooks III. In the ensuing three decades, nine albums have followed as he’s grown in skill, experience and stature. In the 1990s, he was a member of a trio led by Rufus Reid as well as Randy Weston’s group. Since that time, a master of the six, seven and twelve string guitars, he’s played regularly in New York City at jazz clubs like Birdland, Iridium, 55 Bar and the Blue Note, and he’s worked with Oliver Lake, James Spaulding, Jimmy McGriff, Melvin Rhyne, Lonnie Smith, Benny Golson, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dewey Redman, Gary Bartz, Ralph Peterson Jr. and more.

Joining Ron in the trio for his Bird & Beckett date are bassist Essiet Okon Essiet and drummer Sylvia Cuenca, consummate, high level musicians with deep jazz resumes (Essiet with Art Blakey and countless other associations, and Sylvia with Joe Henderson and Clark Terry among many more). Though based professionally in New York to this day and for decades, always with international reach, Essiet and Sylvia have been well rooted in and prized contributors to the vibrant Bay Area jazz scene since the spring of 2020.

Catch them in our live stream if you can’t make it to the shop, but there’s nothing like hearing the music in the acoustic intimacy that the books and close personal contact provide.