A Generational Band Reimagines Yoko Ono’s Songbook Outside a Los Angeles Museum

Yoko Ono did not attend the tribute that bore her name, but the show outside the Broad museum worked on its own terms. “Yoko Only: A Night Celebrating the Music of Yoko Ono” assembled a five-piece Yo La Tengo—augmented by Wilco’s Nels Cline and Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda, who curated the evening—as the backing band for a string of vocalists who treated Ono’s catalog less as an avant-garde artifact and more as malleable song material.

Ira Kaplan’s introduction to “What Did I Do!” set the tone. “I’d like to dedicate this to the Beatles,” he said, then added: “It’s been long enough that we no longer bear a grudge for them trying to break up the Plastic Ono Band.” The joke landed because the night kept pulling Ono’s work out of old caricatures. The nineteen-song set cut from a 1970 piece recorded with Ornette Coleman to the disco pulse of “Walking on Thin Ice,” and the blunt grief of “No, No, No,” written after John Lennon’s murder, became a raw two-voice exchange between Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker.

Tucker spoke backstage about what the riot grrrl generation took from Ono: permission to bypass filter, to let expression be the whole point. That idea held across the evening. Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus opened with “We Are All Water,” updating the lyric’s rogues’ gallery to current villains. Deerhoof’s Satomi Matsuzaki turned “Tabetai” into staccato play.

The concert functioned as an extension of the museum’s exhibition, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” but it avoided archival reverence. It showed the songs thriving in the hands of people who never needed convincing that Ono’s music belonged at the center of the conversation, not the fringes. At ninety-three, she didn’t need to be there for the argument to land.