City Stages

The museum’s popular summer concerts return in expanded form! The city’s premier global music series now reaches into five neighborhoods throughout the city. In partnership with FRONT International, the expanded City Stages series features the very best in global music, in neighborhoods where Clevelanders can discover the art and artists of FRONT in nearby exhibitions and installations. Summertime fun that is free to all!

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FRONT Public Opening Celebration with Jupiter & Okwess

Sat/Jul 14, Uptown in University Circle. From Kinshasa, Jupiter Bonkodji and his band bring traditional Congolese rhythms into a contemporary African music inhabited simultaneously by the fighting instinct of Fela Kuti and the moralistic fiber of Jean de La 
Fontaine.

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Sidi Touré

Wed/Jul 18, Transformer Station, West 29th Street & Church Avenue, Ohio City. A highly acclaimed practitioner of Songhai music whose band features the most exciting new faces on the Malian music scene, Touré makes music driven by the energy and groove of the rhythms—a danceable, dynamic, trance music 
overflowing with joy and carried by the beauty of Sidi’s voice.

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Orquesta el Macabeo

Wed/Jul 25, Transformer Station, West 29th Street & Church Avenue, Ohio City. One of the great sensations of the current Puerto Rican salsa scene, Orquesta el Macabeo recovers the island’s salsa tradition to update it with new ideas and the energy of its 11 musicians. Their plan: revindicate the true heavy, heavy sound of the “salsa gorda.”

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Cheick Hamala Diabate

Wed/Aug 15, Downtown, Mall B. Diabate is a West African historian in the Griot tradition who at an early age mastered the ngoni, a stringed lute and ancestor to the banjo. He later learned to play guitar from his uncle, legendary Super Rail Band guitarist Djelimady Tounkara. Diabate fuses the traditions of his ancestors with the more electric sounds he has absorbed over a decade living in the US.

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M.A.K.U. Soundsystem

Wed/Aug 29, PNC Glenville Arts Campus, East 105th & Wade Park. Juxtaposing the traditional percussion of their Colombian homeland with drums, electric bass, guitar, and vocals, NYC-based M.A.K.U. Soundsystem creates an explosive performance filled with unshakable grooves.

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Gili Yalo

Fri/Sep 7, Nord Family Greenway in front of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Combining Ethiopian roots music with a modern touch of jazz and soul, Tel Aviv–based Gili Yalo incorporates traditional sound into the music of right now. Yalo’s family was part of the migration of Ethiopian Jews fleeing famine in Sudan for Israel—and in the course of this exhausting and emotional journey, the music encouraged Gili and his family to keep on moving.