--- title: "The Broad is throwing a Yoko Ono concert and Yo La Tengo is headlining" description: "\"Yoko Only\" runs 7:30 to 11 p.m. on Saturday, August 8, on the East West Bank Plaza outside the Broad. Yuka Honda of Cibo Matto put the bill together. It closes out the museum's Yoko Ono retrospective, her first solo museum show in Southern California, which is up through October 11." category: "Entertainment" category_url: https://herald.la/category/entertainment author: "Lucía Fuentes" published: 2026-08-02T13:54:08.000Z updated: 2026-08-02T13:54:08.000Z canonical: https://herald.la/article/the-broad-is-throwing-a-yoko-ono-concert-and-yo-la-tengo-is-headlining tags: ["yoko-ono", "the-broad", "downtown-los-angeles", "concerts", "museums"] --- # The Broad is throwing a Yoko Ono concert and Yo La Tengo is headlining "Yoko Only" runs 7:30 to 11 p.m. on Saturday, August 8, on the East West Bank Plaza outside the Broad. Yuka Honda of Cibo Matto put the bill together. It closes out the museum's Yoko Ono retrospective, her first solo museum show in Southern California, which is up through October 11. The most interesting thing about the concert the Broad is putting on next Saturday is who agreed to play it. "Yoko Only" is set for 7:30 to 11 p.m. on August 8 on the East West Bank Plaza, the outdoor courtyard at the museum at 221 S. Grand Avenue. [Yuka Honda, half of the 1990s New York duo Cibo Matto, assembled the program](https://laist.com/news/los-angeles-activities/yoko-ono-broad-museum-music). Yo La Tengo headline, playing with Nels Cline and Honda herself. The rest of the bill is the argument. Theo Bleckmann, Finom, Dave Harrington, Emi Helfrich, Satomi Matsuzaki of Deerhoof, Maggie Parkins, Patrick Shiroishi, Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney, Sylvan Esso, Tune-Yards and Rufus Wainwright are all on it, per LAist. That is a lineup drawn from indie rock, experimental vocal music, free improvisation and art pop, and the common thread running through it is not a genre. It is a debt. ## What the debt is Ono's reputation with the general public was set by a story about a band she married into. Her reputation among working musicians was set by the records. She was making conceptual and performance work in New York years before she met John Lennon, and she brought that method to music rather than abandoning it. Two things from that period keep turning up in the practice of the artists on this bill. The first is the voice used as an instrument rather than a delivery system for melody. On the 1970 album "Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band" she sang in shrieks, glides and wordless sound, closer to free jazz horn playing than to anything on the radio at the time. Half the vocalists on the Broad's plaza next Saturday work in territory that record opened. The second is the instruction piece: a work that exists as a written direction and is completed by whoever carries it out. It relocates the art from the object to the act, and it hands authorship to the audience. A concert of other people performing Ono's material is not a tribute in the ordinary sense so much as the form working as designed. ## The Beatles thing It is worth being plain about this, because it is the reason a lot of people would not otherwise go. The claim that Ono broke up the Beatles has been the dominant popular fact about her for more than fifty years, and it does not survive contact with the band's own chronology: the business fights, the creative divergence and the exhaustion were all underway on their own terms. She was a convenient explanation, and she was foreign, avant-garde and unwilling to be decorative, which made her a durable one. We are not asking readers to relitigate a band. The point is narrower. If your entire impression of an artist comes from a story about somebody else's career, you have not yet encountered the work, and there is quite a lot of it. ## Practical details The concert is on the plaza, outdoors, and tickets are required and sold through the museum's website. LAist's write-up does not list a price and the museum's event listing we could reach does not either, so check the site before going. The exhibition it closes out is ["Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,"](https://www.thebroad.org) on view May 23 through October 11 and billed by the Broad as Ono's first solo museum exhibition in Southern California. It covers roughly seven decades of work, and a fair amount of it is meant to be handled rather than looked at, including tying a wish to an olive tree and hammering a nail into a painting. General admission to the Broad is free. The concert ticket is separate. ## Sources - [Yoko Ono has inspired many bands. This Broad tribute show proves it](https://laist.com/news/los-angeles-activities/yoko-ono-broad-museum-music) - [The Broad](https://www.thebroad.org)