Live at the Five and Dime Presents Blue Thread

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Blue Thread with Cristi Catt and Nikola Radan.

The fourth season of the "Live at the Five & Dime" outdoor concert series continues on Thursday, July 15, with the group Blue Thread, featuring Cristi Catt (soprano), Nikola Radan (flutes, guitar and percussion), Mahshid Iraniparast (santoor) and Cody Lucas (guitar).

The series is free, and concerts are from 5-7 p.m. every Thursday outside the Walmart Museum on the Bentonville Square.

Blue Thread will present an evening of tales from Portuguese, Sephardic, Celtic and American ballads intertwined with Persian, Balkans and other global music traditions. The group will also perform songs of Emma Dusenbury, Almeda Riddle and other local tunes. The concert celebrates the release of their album, All Over the Map.

Portugal's Evora News writes of their 2017 debut concert: "Blue Thread revealed a vibrant and playful music that transported us to the rich and varied musical experience of medieval times without abandoning the present." Catt's singing has been described as "stunning" by the Los Angeles Times while Radan is praised as "striking" by the Boston Globe. 

Over the years, Kansan Catt and Serbian Radan converse on music as a thread that binds cultures, languages and religions. The thread is blue, colored by the melancholy "blues" that haunt their tunes and by the sea that both inspires the lyrics of many of their songs and provides passageways between cultures. Catt specializes in medieval music and has built numerous performance and recording projects around medieval and folk songs.

She has made several trips to Arkansas to dive into the wealth of ballads, field recordings, books and other research materials in the Special Collections of Mullins Library at the U of A. She has recordings with MDG, Telarc, Erato and several independent labels. Radan has long been fascinated by Sephardic ballad traditions that have traveled from Spain to diverse points around the globe. Together with their special guests, they trace ballads that have traveled from Portugal to India to Greece to the Ozarks and beyond.

"Live at the Five & Dime" features weekly free concerts through October. The concerts are a collaboration between the U of A's Department of Music, the Walmart Museum and Downtown Bentonville Inc. The performances feature faculty, students and other artists connected to the Department of Music and overlap with the Thursday Farmer's Market on the Bentonville Square.