Brewery turned recording studio, J-Bones Musicland, to kick off 2024 live concert series with Braley, Kye
J-Bones Musicland, the brewery turned recording studio in east Spokane, will start its 2024 live concert series with local artists Blake Braley and Aspen Kye on Saturday.
Braley’s performance is not just a celebration of the local songwriter’s latest works, but the effort taken by studio owner Jay Condiotti to convert his recording room into a music venue capable of creating professional recordings in front of a live audience.
“As an engineer, it’s very exciting because there’s all these different things to figure out and optimize,” Condiotti said. “It’s not just doing studio recordings or overdub sessions, there’s a new dimension where you have the audience involved.”
Saturday’s show will also be live-streamed on YouTube by Northwest Passages, the community-funded event organization produced by The Spokesman-Review.
The first artist to record a video of the concert series was Braley himself, with a November 2023 show that proved to artists and audiences alike that the hybrid approach could produce a fun in-person experience and compelling promotional pieces online.
“I really wanted to do it live with the band,” Braley said. “The best compliments I’ve received about it have been how different it sounds from the other stuff that we’ve released, and the quality of the recording sounds a lot better.”
The first single from that session, “Look What You’ve Done” appeared online one week ago today – complete with concert footage and an audience vocalizing their appreciation for the grooves that Braley and crew were putting down.
“He was the first guy to really take advantage of it and see the possibilities of doing a crowd-funded event here,” Condiotti said. “You’re recording a live album and you’re doing the video, and you’re syncing it up so you have something to put on Spotify and YouTube.”
Talking about his involvement in the concert series, Braley said, “It came together really naturally, just talking about ideas and what he’s trying to do and kind of move into the direction of a studio-slash-music venue. All of the ticket prices funded it and allowed us to pay the videographers and all of the musicians involved.”
Condiotti’s first live session featured local songwriters Aspen Kye and Melissa Landrus in a sold-out showcase in November 2022, almost a year before Braley’s own live session.
The event sold-out and went on to inspire the additions of the elevated stage and professional PA that now reside inside the revamped live room.
For Condiotti, the live music element of the studio reminds him of his own work as a gigging musician, often playing in that same room when it used to be the Iron Goat Brewery location until 2015.
“I knew the owners, and when they told me they were selling the building, I had expressed interest before because I used to do gigs here,” he said. “It was such a fun place to play, and the acoustics were just awesome. It’s a large recording studio-slash-sound stage (now), but I first came to it when it was more like a venue.”
Now, the turn-of-the-century stylings of the J-Bones studio interior are once again hosting live music for fans to enjoy in a full-circle moment for Condiotti as he opens the door for Spokane talent to shine.
“It was my complete intention to attract the up-and-coming, passionate, younger musicians in this area and the region,” Condiotti said. “When I put forth the possibility that they could do live, crowd-funded events that could be on social media and on an album, they automatically understood what you could do with that.”