Nonprofit lifts local musicians

Jim Pugh, the veteran pianist who played with top artists like Etta James and B.B. King and now pours much of his energy into finding and recording worthy California musicians who might otherwise go unheard, flipped for Mariachi Mestizo when he caught the Delano (Kern County) teenagers two years ago in a Tulare County park.

Listening to the radio as he drove home that night to Santa Ynez (Santa Barbara County), Pugh heard a classic ’50s Frank Sinatra orchestral track recorded at Capitol Records in Hollywood, where Pugh decided on the spot to record the young mariachis because he felt the strings would sound good in the Sinatra studio. The recording and video made there by Pugh’s nonprofit Little Village Foundation brought Mariachi Mestizo to the attention of music programmers around the country, including at Carnegie Hall, where the band performed in April.

“They went from this little park in the Central Valley to Carnegie Hall. It’s an amazing story,” says Pugh, whose second batch of Little Village releases, out July 14, includes “Descansos,” a spoken-word album with musical interludes by 17-year-old slam poet and Mariachi Mestizo trumpeter Xóchitl Morales. She writes about pesticide poisoning, inequality and other aspects of Chicano life in the valley.

“Creativity just flows from this woman,” says Pugh, whose foundation funders include Bonnie Raitt and the Bill Graham Memorial Foundation.

Little Village also is putting out a CD by the Sons of the Soul Revivers gospel quartet recorded live in Marin County at Rancho Nicasio, whose proprietor Bob Brown suggested the date (Pugh was already a fan of the group from his days producing the Gospel Hummingbirds).

Then there’s a new one by wily San Francisco songwriter and singer Maurice Tani, “The Lovers Card”; “Sand in My Blood” by desert punk musician Sean Wheeler, doing more traditional material in a style Pugh calls “psychobilly rock”; and the first record in eight years by veteran Bay Area bluesman Chris Cain, playing guitar, piano and alto sax on original tracks that Pugh says summon Ray Charles and Guitar Slim circa 1955.

For more information, go to www.littlevillagefoundation. com.