Yo La Tengo, Sleater-Kinnery Saluting Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono’s music is getting a rare large-scale live reintroduction with a lineup featuring a host of indie all-stars. As part of Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, the 93-year-old artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Southern California, the Broad has announced Yoko Only, a one-night tribute concert dedicated entirely to songs from Ono and the Plastic Ono Band.

The event will take place Aug. 8 on East West Bank Plaza at the Broad as part of the project, which runs from Saturday (May 23) through Oct. 11. Curated by Yuka Honda, the performance will bring together Yo La Tengo, Nels Cline, Sleater-Kinney, Sylvan Esso, Tune-Yards, Rufus Wainwright and Satomi Matsuzaki, alongside a cast of vocalists and experimental musicians interpreting songs from across Ono’s uncompromising catalog. Click here for tickets.

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Indeed, Ono’s contributions to experimental art and avant-garde music have historically been overshadowed by her association with John Lennon and the Beatles narrative. But over the past decade, a growing generation of younger artists have increasingly cited Ono as an influence. And at the Broad, performers have been paired with songs reflecting Ono’s recurring themes of liberation, vulnerability, resistance and radical imagination.

“Music was the first thing on Yoko’s artistic mind; it began during her childhood and grew through many stages of her life,” says Honda, who has collaborated onstage and in the studio with Ono numerous times. “Like dandelion seeds, her ideas flew and landed in our hearts, opening our mind’s eye to new skies. On August 8th, we will unite to celebrate the flower garden she gave us.”

The larger Music of the Mind exhibition, which is organized with Tate Modern in London, will explore Ono’s seven-decade career across visual art, performance, activism, Fluxus experimentation and music. It will offer what the Broad describes as the most expansive presentation of her work ever staged in Southern California.

Although reported to be in strong health for her age, Ono has rarely appeared in public this decade and has ceded oversight of Lennon’s archives to the couple’s son, Sean. Last year, he won the Grammy for Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package for his work on a 50th anniversary reissue of his father’s 1973 solo album Mind Games.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

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