Amythyst Kiah
Our Common Nature Presents Chris Thile with Special Guest Amythyst KiahThursday, May 25, 2023
Yo-Yo Ma has partnered with Big Ears to design a week of cultural experiences that lift the myriad voices of Appalachia – Indigenous, European, Latinx, Black, and beyond – and gather local artists, scientists, leaders, and community members in an exploration of our common future, with nature as our guide.
The culmination of this week-long gathering will take place in Knoxville’s World’s Fair Park, where Yo-Yo Ma will be joined by special musical guests including Rhiannon Giddens, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile, along with storytellers, poets, puppets, and dancers in a concert experience like none other. The festival grounds at the World’s Fair Park will be a carefully curated, multi-faceted Appalachian celebration of its own, highlighting some of the region’s very best food and arts and crafts, along with storytelling events, square dancing, music making and more.
These events continue Ma’s multi-year, multi-location project, Our Common Nature, which has brought together communities from Maine to Hawai‘i to explore the many ways in which culture connects us to the natural world and to one another.
About Chris Thile:
MacArthur Fellow and Grammy Award-winning mandolinist, singer, songwriter Chris Thile, who the Guardian calls "that rare being: an all-round musician who can settle into any style, from bluegrass to classical," and NPR calls a "genre-defying musical genius," is a founding member of the critically acclaimed bands Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek. For four years, Thile hosted public radio favorite Live from Here with Chris Thile (formerly known as A Prairie Home Companion). With his broad outlook, Thile creates a distinctly American canon and a new musical aesthetic for performers and audiences alike, giving the listener "one joyous arc, with the linear melody and vertical harmony blurring into a single web of gossamer beauty" (New York Times).
Most recently, Chris recorded Laysongs, out June 4, 2021 on Nonesuch. The album is his first truly solo album: just Thile, his voice, and his mandolin, on new recordings of six original songs and three covers, all of which contextualize and banter with his ideas about spirituality. Recorded in a converted upstate New York church during the pandemic, Laysongs' centerpiece is the three-part "Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth," which was inspired by C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. The album also features a song Thile wrote about Dionysus; a performance of the fourth movement of Béla Bartók's Sonata for Solo Violin; "God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot" based on Buffy Sainte-Marie's adaptation of a Leonard Cohen poem; a cover of bluegrass legend Hazel Dickens' "Won't You Come and Sing for Me," and "Ecclesiastes 2:24," original instrumental loosely modeled after the Prelude from J.S. Bach's Partita for Solo Violin in E Major.
We reserve the right to revoke tickets sold to a broker or unauthorized third party. If you are holding a revoked ticket, you will not be admitted and will not receive a refund.
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