Show Report: Genevieve Artadi (2)/YIBS @ Mid City Yacht Club, 12/19/2024
Watching the jazz festival from a boat inside a restaurant
I'm in a bar. I'm sitting in a boat. I'm in the combination bar, sitting in a boat. Welcome to the Mid City Yacht Club, an event space in LA that's on some real TARDIS shit. Outside? Non-assuming. Inside? A boat. The theme? Under the sea. It’s like the first bar a 21-year-old Poseidon would walk into. Very aquatic. Did I mention the boat. There's a pirate flag. There's a trident. There's...a Steinway piano? Sure. Why not. Maybe it's made out of driftwood. I didn't know this place existed until yesterday, and I'm probably not cool enough to ever be invited back, which is funny because I'd describe the overall aesthetic as an art department trying too hard to make a quirky dive for a multi-camera sitcom. If seen on screen, you'd never believe it was a real place. [Face/Off voice] I want to put a boat...in a restaurant.
Surrounding me were the hyper-cool, arty kids of LA, each bursting with a confidence I've never been able to manifest, even at my drunkest. Cool clothes, cool hair, cool lives. And then there's me, a person who a student once described as "if a wizard did CrossFit," sitting in a boat in a bar. I am wearing a Jesus Lizard shirt and a Pyrrhon hoodie. I don't make it easy for myself.
The reason the cool people are rubbing shoulders with me is because this is night three of the Minaret Jazz Fest, celebrating the fifth anniversary of Yousef Hilmy's record label. Minaret has become a home to the virtuosically inclined creative set of LA, releasing records by chiquitamagic and Dolphin Hyperspace, to name two. It also hosts a variety of fun events, including the Louis Cole choral show I saw a few months back, which you might remember if you follow my Instagram. (Please follow my Instagram.)
This particular night at the boat-bedecked Mid City Yacht Club sold out super quick because the pull of Genevieve Artadi, of Knower and a frequent collaborator with Cole's, is that strong. When Hilmy introduced her, he said she was "the queen of LA," and I can't dispute that title. I last caught Artadi a little over a year ago with an all-star band that included chiquitamagic and Pedro Martins. That jump-started my musical love affair with Martins, a guitarist whose solo tone sounds like sheer glass. And Artadi was excellent, using a neat vocal cadence to navigate her subtly complex originals while capping off the night with a cover of her parents' obscure single.
But before I could have my sonic reunion with Artadi and her band, I got YIBS, the improvisational soundscape jazz group of Tone Whitfield and Simon Martinez. Those two were joined by two other musicians, expanding the group to a quartet. Hooray, your least favorite lupine can count. And...you know...it was exceptionally not my shit. YIBS presented the same problem as Mono: I don't want to hear this stuff in a live setting. At home? Sure. I like my "free" and "weird" — which are two of the identifying genre tags on YIBS’s Bandcamp — as much as any free and weird individual. But in person? I struggled to focus. There were some neat timbres, and the sound was great, giving YIBS the dynamic space to experiment with quiet/loud tension. It's also clearly evident that everyone involved can play and has a keen artistic mind. This wasn't like when I used to play in bands loosely described as "Lightning Bolt but worse," that thrashed out a tempest of unstructured bullshit. That said, whew, it was tough sledding hearing bass plinks and someone crumpling paper for upwards of 20 minutes. For me, not it. Indescribably so.
Genevieve Artadi is more my speed, particularly her last album, Forever Forever, which was a slow burn that I've grown to really enjoy. Artadi's compositional style has this fascinating push and pull between immediacy and stuff that needs to work its way through your veins. As an example, one of the new songs she played, "Ode to Spaghetti," which is an ode to her dog Spaghetti, has a cute sunniness to it that belies the complicated jazz stuff working beneath the surface. And her band absolutely bodied that complicated jazz stuff, a crack sextet consisting of chiquitamagic (bass synth), Chris Fishman (keys), Thom Gill (guitar), Sam Wilkes (bass), and Justin Brown (drums). These are all players that could draw big crowds on their own, so to see them in a relatively small space/marina was really something.
Naturally, Artadi plus crew delivered on the promise of something. They got down, with each member shredding and setting up Artadi, who donned full Christmas attire, to burrow into the groove and chip out these wild yet subtle melodies from the continually growing jazz edifice. In the parlance of jazz YouTube, it was very spicy. The highlight was "Visionary," the first single from Forever Forever, which gave everyone space to solo. The lowlight was people not shutting up during the performance. It will never not surprise me that people will pay money to go to a show and yap the entire time. I mean, people were outside of the venue asking if anyone had an extra ticket; that's how hot this show was. And here are these morons taking up space, discussing absolutely zilch, nattering on just to natter, like some mutant Chas & Dave song come to life. It's like if someone decided to write their shopping list in the margins of the world's most beautiful book. Instead of these jerks, someone could've been here who would've appreciated this night. So irritating. Get off the boat and walk the plank, dickheads.
***
Depending on when this goes up, I’ve either exhausted the backlog or have gotten close to doing so, so things are going to slow down a bit. I’m eyeing a Monday/Friday posting schedule. I might throw up — and in the word vomit sense, that’s almost literal — the odd post on Wednesday if I’ve gone to too many shows. Year-end coverage next, which means we’re taking a break from Tracks of Note for a week or two.
Thanks for reading.
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