Little Hill Lounge, neighborhood watering hole, showcases lesser known musicians

Eli Knowles didn’t have high hopes the first time he wandered a few blocks from his Richmond Annex apartment over to the Little Hill Lounge.

After a year and half working as a jazz drummer in Berlin, the Albany native had moved back to the East Bay at the end of 2021 when he heard that the owners of The Kon-Tiki in Oakland had bought the moribund bar on a nondescript block of San Pablo Avenue just north of Portola Drive. 

“They were doing their soft opening and I went down the first day with no real expectations,” he recalled. “I just thought it would be great if this was a cool bar I wanted to hang out at. The room has that David Lynch-y quality. I imagined myself walking along San Pablo not really knowing where I was going, and wandering in, finding this weird lounge piano in the back.”

Three years later, Knowles isn’t just hanging out at the Little Hill Lounge. He’s become a cornerstone of the venue’s eclectic music programming, which encompasses ambient jazz, country, karaoke, rock and some of the region’s most interesting DJs. He’s playing there several nights a month and running sound other nights. His bi-monthly solo keyboard residency has evolved into a striking duo with Richmond saxophonist/composer Rent Romus, a near-legendary figure who has toiled for decades documenting and building the Bay Area’s underground music scene.  

The recent donation of a keyboard by Keys to the City, a Bay Area collective dedicated to providing instruments to “third places” spaces, has helped make the lounge’s intimate back room a particularly bright spot on an East Bay music scene still recovering from the pandemic hangover. Physically separated from the bar, which inhabits the center of the main lounge, the venue draws people  equally interested in hearing music as in socializing. 

“Now that there’s a Rhodes I don’t have to lug my Wurlitzer over from home,” Knowles said. “But more than anything, to have a neighborhood venue presenting the bands I would go out to see (elsewhere), it’s a dream come true.”

Little Hill’s history as gathering spot dates back to at least the 1940s

The building at 10753 San Pablo Ave. in El Cerrito has a long history as a neighborhood gathering spot, dating back at least to the 1940s. In previous incarnations it was known as Phil’s Hut and Gregory’s Bar & Lounge, when it also presented music. Theodore Helmick, former proprietor of San Francisco’s Hemlock Tavern, had owned Little Hill Lounge for six years when he put it on the market in the fall of 2021. 

The Kon Tiki owners Matt Reagan and Christ Aivaliotis purchased the building and instead of doing a major remodel they decided to preserve much of the bar’s original flavor, with vintage beer signs on the walls and a black peg-letter board drink menu that looks like it’s been there since the Eisenhower Administration. 

“We always wanted to have a smaller music venue, offer more intimate shows,” Aivaliotis said while taking some time off from shutting down The Kon-Tiki, the popular Oakland bar that garnered a burst of new attention when word of its closing emerged from his no-holds-barred Instagram post. 

“There used to be a pool table in the back. We took that out and built a back stage,” he continued. “Ted ran the Hemlock, so the sound gear was here already, and there wasn’t much question about revamping the look. We wanted it to feel like a bar my dad would take me to in the early 1970s, tapping into somebody’s nostalgia whether they experienced it or not.”

Aivaliotis noted that while its street address is in El Cerrito, it sits adjacent to the Richmond Annex, letting it maintain the ungentrified vibe that makes much of the northern San Pablo corridor evocative of the region’s rapidly receding past. 

Free admission means compensating musicians can be a challenge (there’s often a tip jar), but it means there is a core of regulars who come by several times a week. The music draws newcomers, and the word is out on the musicians’ grapevine. Players from far beyond the Bay Area have been reaching out to Knowles looking for gigs. For Aivaliotis, who’s gotten to know several neighboring business owners, the vibe couldn’t be more different than Oakland.

On a recent Tuesday, the future was on tap at the Little Hill Lounge as Knowles’ and Romus’ set gradually filled the back room, attracting a diverse audience that included musical luminaries such s guitarist and recording engineer Myles Boisen and vocalist Jill Rogers (who perform together in the Oakland honkytonk band Crying Time). Starting with an undulating ballad, the duo danced through a meditative program that lulled and simmered, ebbing and flowing with small troughs of tension-seeking release. 

On a solo turn, Knowles accompanied himself deftly, playing fuzzy chords on a keyboard adorned with a menagerie of plushies while crooning Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” in the style of Chet Baker. With Romus returning on flute, the tunes tended to flow one into the next, a seamless celestial cloth that gleamed with Romus’ accents on bells. 

Knowles and Romus return to the Little Hill Lounge on Jan. 7 and Jan. 21, continuing their first and third Tuesday of the month residency. They’ve been doing the duo sets for about six months, but Romus started coming by the bar to hang out in the spring of 2023. At that point, Knowles had been holding down the Tuesday slots as a solo act, “and I love listening to him sing,” Romus said.

He quickly found a welcoming community at the lounge, from the bartenders and music director Julio Palacios to Aivaliotis, who has gotten increasingly involved in the bar’s day-to-day operations. Something of a connoisseur of alternative venues, he recently wrapped up some two decades of booking the Luggage Store Gallery’s New Music Series in San Francisco. 

Over roughly the same span of time he has released hundreds of albums on his experimental-minded label Edgetone Records by a broad swath of leading artists in improvised and electronic music, and regularly produces festivals and concerts via Outsound Presents. In recent years Romus’ most ambitious works, large scale musical rituals inspired by the poetry of Finland’s epic mythology, have unfolded at Berkeley’s Finnish Hall performed by his sprawling Life’s Blood Ensemble. 

As a venue in which he unleashes his intensely distilled lyricism, Little Hill Lounge offers an outlet for a very different side of Romus. 

“My musical life has mostly been in underground spaces and galleries, which are more of a listening situation,” he said. “What I like about Little Hill Lounge is that the bar isn’t connected directly to music and you can have that listening room experience.”

It has also been a venue that broadened his musical exposure, turning him onto artists such as country-tinged singer/songwriter Meredith Edgar, a Little Hill regular “who’s absolutely brilliant,” Romus said. “My ears have opened up. Country and western, punk,  rap acts. They have an ambient night residency. I love the diversity of music and people from all walks of life. Christ (Aivaliotis) has a deep interest in community, and has created an all-around unique space in the East Bay.”