Blue Thread is going to launch a week of concerts, installations and outreach programs in Northwest Arkansas in July between 13-16 of 2022. Venues include the Crystal Bridges Museum, Walton Museum in Bentonville, the King Theater, Van Buren, and Mount Sequoyah in Fayetteville.

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In this program, Blue Thread brings together the Hindustani and Carnatic classical and folk music traditions, and pairs them with Portuguese, Sephardic, Celtic, and American song traditions, as well as with folk ballads. For the past ten years, Catt and Radan have been conversing and collaborating on the ways in which music connects people as it travels. Like a replicating organism, over land or by sea, music adapts and regenerates, finding life in new times, different places. Through music, cultures and languages find common ground. For each program, Catt and Radan invites special guests and local communities to join the conversation and a new thread begins. In this new program they invited singers Daniela Tosic from the Balkans and Priya Ram from India as well as Indian violinist and percussionist Kartik Balachandran and Santosh Ramaswamy, and Cody Lucas a guitarist from the Ozarks.

Catt specializes in Medieval music and has built numerous performance and recording projects around the Galician-Portuguese Cantigas de Amigo folk songs. Nikola Radan, on the other hand, has long been fascinated by Sephardic ballad traditions that have traveled from Spain to diverse points around the globe, as well as by the roots of western music influences from the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Together with their special guests, Radan and Catt trace ballads that have traveled from Portugal, to India, Greece, the Ozarks, and beyond. 

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A beloved Portuguese romance and folk song, Bela Infanta, is also a world traveler. It pairs perfectly with the Cantigas de Amigo. In the cantigas, a woman waits by the sea for her lover to return. Bela Infanta opens with a young woman waiting by the sea and her lover returns in disguise. He, then, tests her loyalty and, in most versions, the two lovers are reunited. In their new album, Blue Thread presents a new telling of this tale that weaves together Portuguese, Sephardic, and Ozark ballads with its Indian roots. They also include a new version of the popular ballad, Cruel Sisters. This version shows traces of its travel through China, Scandinavia, Ireland, Iceland, and the US. Join Blue Thread for a musical journey of global storytelling full of love, longing, suspense, betrayal, and in some cases, murder.