For the Bronx crew ESG, another group formed by sisters — Renee Scruggins and her younger siblings Valerie, Deborah and Marie, along with a friend, Tito Libran — Lincoln Center was the far-off home of the New York Philharmonic, watched on PBS. Renee Scruggins, ESG’s frontwoman, said the show next month will be the first time she has set foot in the space. (ESG has performed at Carnegie Hall, and in arenas like Barclays Center, opening for Robyn, one of the many acts that followed in its sonic footprints.)
ESG — it stands for emerald, silver and gold — was born as a way for the Scruggins girls to stay out of trouble, and its unique sound blended all the genres they were surrounded by in the Boogie Down borough, circa the late ’70s and early ’80s: punk, funk, hip-hop and Latin grooves. “We like to play music that makes people dance,” Scruggins, 65, said, in a phone interview from her home in Georgia. Crafting the Lincoln Center set list for the group, which now includes her children, she had one mantra: “You should not be sitting in your seat.”
Their joyful vibe was not always easy to come by. Her sister Valerie was once derided by a sound tech for drumming “like a girl,” Scruggins recalled. At another gig, “she beat that drum so hard that the stage started to come apart,” Scruggins said. “Those two stories go hand-in-hand in my mind.”
And even as its music became part of countless hits for others, ESG did not earn royalties, given the contracts the bandmates signed early in their career. (In 1992, they released an EP called “Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills.”) They fought for recognition, too. Once, when they were performing the wordless, spooky “UFO,” “I heard a kid say, ‘They are doing Doug E. Fresh!’” Scruggins recalled. “I said, excuse me, young man, Doug E. Fresh was doing ESG. Get it straight!”
Still, ESG remained true to their own path. “The whole course of our career, we stayed on independent labels, if not putting it out ourselves,” Scruggins said. “We wanted to do it our way.”
That ethos animates this Songbook series, its creators said. (It concludes with a performance by Ana Tijoux, the French-Chilean rapper, returning after a decadelong break.)
