Little Village Foundation label home to big Bay Area talent
After more than 30 years on the road with R&B legend Etta James and blues star Robert Cray, keyboardist Jim Pugh decided he was ready for the next chapter of his life.
“I had become pretty cynical about being in the music biz and a band, and I knew that at 60 I wasn’t interested in getting back on a bus and driving across the country,” Pugh says. “A friend of mine said I should try to figure out my passion, what I really wanted to do.”
He spent some time working in a community garden, but Pugh instead discovered his true calling: harvesting a dazzlingly diverse array of music as the founder and talent scout of a utopian nonprofit music outlet called Little Village Foundation. Over the past three years, the organization has released 16 albums that shine a welcome spotlight on a far-flung roster of California musicians, most of whom are entirely overlooked by the mainstream entertainment industry.
On Friday, Freight & Salvage presents a concert showcasing more than half a dozen acts with Little Village Foundation albums. Billed as “A Cavalcade of Stars,” the revue includes Philippine-born Oakland folk singer Aireene Espiritu (“Back Where I Belong”), Vallejo gospel quartet the Sons of the Soul Revivers (“Live! Rancho Nicasio”), 18-year-old Delano spokenword artist Xochitl Morales (“Descansos”), and Indianborn San Jose blues harmonica player Aki Kumar (“Aki Goes to Bollywood”).
“I’m looking for interesting people and trying to raise awareness about them. I’m not necessarily interested in the best guitar player in the world,” Pugh says, though South Bay blues guitar great Chris Cain, who’s also on the Freight bill, released an excellent eponymous album as part of the label’s latest batch.
While Pugh is the foundation’s guiding spirit, he’s the first to proclaim that it takes a village to run a grass-roots operation. No artist has played a more important role in Little Village than rootsy Berkeley singer-songwriter Maurice Tani, who’s also performing on the Freight showcase.
Widely esteemed on the Bay Area music scene for years as a top-shelf songwriter, Tani released once of his best albums yet in 2017, “The Lovers Card,” and like many fellow Little Villagers his association with the label has tremendously
boosted his visibility.
“I’ve been in the area doing this a long time, but 2016 was my first time playing Hardly Strictly Bluegrass,” Tani says. “Aki Kumar’s Bollywood blues project is so exciting and different. Xochitl Morales’ spoken-word work is heartwrenching. You can start to see this thread that runs through all of the Little Village releases, and that thread is Jim.”
In Pugh’s village, the central concern is serving artists rather than accumulating intellectual property and publishing. The foundation pays for the recording process and a run of 1,000 CDs, with the majority going to the artist to sell. Little Village doesn’t collect royalties or retain any publishing rights.
Growing up near Chicago, Pugh caught the blues bug in the 1960s and moved out to the Bay Area in 1973 to attend the conservatory
at the University of the Pacific. But within a year he’d relocated to San Francisco and started an immersive course of study playing Hammond organ in working-class African-American bars, “the university of Fillmore Street,” he says. “I’d get a stack of dimes and listen to a tune on the jukebox until I could play it.”
He landed his first highvisibility gig in the Sly and the Family Stone spinoff Rubicon, and before long became a ubiquitous presence on the blues scene, touring and recording with artists such as Elvin Bishop, Buddy Miles, Otis Rush and Robert Cray, with whom he toured for nearly 25 years.
“I have a real passion for music and diversity and I like helping people,” Pugh says. “Not in big ways. I’m not a philanthropist. But it’s starting to be noticed by the philanthropic and music communities. There’s a growing group of people who are like-minded, who want to release music that might not otherwise be exposed.”