All World Premiere Recordings

Grammy Award-winning Third Coast Percussion, whose artistry blends “creative fearlessness with reverent precision” (BBC Music Magazine), offers an album of enterprising collaborations and world-premiere recordings of works written or arranged expressly for the Chicago-based percussion quartet, representing four different approaches to composing concert music.

Danny Elfman’s Percussion Quartet, structured like a four-movement symphony, shares distinctive traits heard in his Grammy-winning, Oscar-nominated films scores, as well as hints of African balofon, Indonesian gamelan, and Shostakovich. Great admirers of composer Philip Glass, Third Coast arranged Glass’s solo piano Metamorphosis No. 1 for marimba, vibraphone, glockenspiel, and melodica. Rubix emerged from Third Coast Percussion’s improvisational collaboration with virtuosic, cutting-edge flute duo Flutronix, who also perform on the recording. Critically acclaimed electronic musician and composer Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) composed her seven-movement Perspective as electronic tracks, without music notation. Third Coast transformed this work of “beautiful complexity” into a version they could perform live as a quartet.

REVIEW:

Unlike a lot of academic music for percussion ensembles, Danny Elfman makes his quartet sing sweetly, leaning heavily on the warm sounds of the marimba interlocking with tinkling tubular chimes and pitched metal pipes.

The flute duo Flutronix's piece, Rubix, features punchy flutes dancing over a chilled out vibraphone, and foggy episodes where marimba, whirly tube and bowed flexatone provide an evocative backdrop of light and shadow.

Footwork is the hyper-beat music born in Chicago's underground dance competitions and house parties in the late 1990s. On Third Coast Percussion's album, the style undergoes a mesmerizing transformation in a seven-movement suite called Perspective, by Jerrilynn Patton, who goes by Jlin.

Third Coast Percussion, with albums like Perspectives, continues to push percussion in new directions, blurring musical boundaries and beguiling new listeners.

-- NPR. org (Tom Huizenga)

Grammy Award-winning Chicago-based percussion quartet Third Coast Percussion (Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, David Skidmore) presents Between Breaths, an album of world premieres of works by four contemporary composers, plus a work by the quartet itself.

Known for their captivating performances and innovative approach to modern classical music, TCP has been praised for “commandingly elegant” (New York Times) performances and the “rare power” (Washington Post) of their recordings. Between Breaths, a follow up to TCP’s widely praised album, Perspectives, “continues to push percussion in new directions, blurring musical boundaries and beguiling new listeners” (NPR).

The works on Between Breaths explore aspects of meditation in sound, incorporate unconventional timbres and tones, and invite listeners to lose themselves within a captivating sonic landscape. Missy Mazzoli’s five-movement Millennium Canticles transports listeners into a vivid realm where a group of people strive to recreate the rituals and stories of human life after an apocalypse. Mazzoli skillfully crafts an evocative soundscape using diverse elements such as wooden planks, resonant metal pipes, tone chimes, drums, discordant metallic tones, a resounding lion's roar, and an array of vocal expressions.

In Practice, a collaborative composition by TCP, began as a sound meditation drawing upon the personal rituals of the quartet’s members, from a warm-up routine to using sounds created with everyday objects. This source material laid the foundation for the work, which developed its own sense of direction and purpose, with an atmosphere of meditation and balance.

Tyondai Braxton's Sunny X juxtaposes otherworldly acoustic and electronic timbres against a steady rhythmic drive. Within this sonic tapestry, resonant wooden planks, metallic pipes and plates, and an array of gongs and woodblocks contribute to a distinctive and immersive experience.

Chicagoan Ayanna Woods’ Triple Point refers to the unique state where a substance simultaneously exists as a gas, liquid, and solid due to temperature and pressure conditions, which results in liquids bubbling into gas, rapidly freezing, exploding, and melting into liquid again. Woods’ composition mirrors this phenomenon, as it encapsulates moments of dynamic energy and musical elements that rise to the surface and dissolve again.

Gemma Peacocke’s Death Wish, composed in tribute to Hinewirangi Kohu-Morgan, a Maori artist, poet, and activist, has become a staple of TCP’s repertoire. Performed by four players on two marimbas, the music creates a powerful landscape of melancholy, personal devastation, and hope.

REVIEW:

Third Coast Percussion’s Between Breaths is another fresh and thought-provoking album in what has been a steady stream of recordings from the Grammy-award winning quartet over the past seven years. Released Sept. 8 on Cedille Records, Between Breaths returns to many themes explored on the ensemble’s debut EP, Ritual Music (2006): relationships between individuals, communities, and ritualistic acts. The highly programmatic and hypnotic new album showcases the quartet’s vision for commissioning works by living composers and features world premiere recordings of works by Missy Mazzoli, Tyondai Braxton, Ayanna Woods, and Gemma Peacocke, and by Third Coast Percussion itself.

-- I Care If You Listen (Forrest Howell)

Third Coast Percussion’s Paddle to the Sea transports listeners into a realm of imaginative sounds and world-premiere recordings evoking the aquatic world. Anchoring the album is the Grammy Award-winning ensemble’s original new collaborative composition Paddle to the Sea. The fearsomely talented foursome conceived it as a live soundtrack to the charming, Oscar-nominated 1966 film of the same name, based on a classic children’s story about a Native Canadian boy who carves a wooden figure called Paddle-to-the-Sea and launches him on a solo canoe voyage to the ocean. The Dallas Morning News called Third Coast’s concert performance “arresting and enjoyable.” TheaterJones called it “unforgettable” and said, “There was something magical about the performance, but it is almost impossible to describe the experience in mere words.” In composing Paddle to the Sea, Third Coast found a wellspring of ideas in the other works they’ve included on the album. Jacob Druckman’s Reflections on the Nature of Water revels in textures and timbres unique to the marimba as it explores the different characters water can embody. Third Coast plays its own arrangement of selections from Philip Glass’s 12 Pieces for Ballet (originally composed for piano) — also drawing inspiration from Brazilian group Uakti’s multi-instrumental version, titled Aguas da Amazonia. The final leg of Third Coast’s waterborne adventure is Zimbabwean Musekiwa Chingdoza’s arrangement of Chingwaya, a song from the Shona tradition used to call water spirits.

REVIEW:

Today’s percussionists are amazing virtuosos, and the members of Third Coast Percussion play with astonishing precision and sensitivity throughout this intelligently planned recital built around the theme of “water” in many of its forms. There are two major works, the most important of which is Jacob Druckman’s amazing marimba solo “Reflections on the Nature of Water.” Its six movement are broken into pairs, and spread throughout the disc. As the idiom is strongly atonal, it makes a refreshing contrast to the mellow harmonic syntax of the remaining pieces.

The other major work is Third World Percussion’s original film score Paddle to the Sea. The movements have evocative titles, some presumably taken from the images to which they correspond: The Lighthouse and the Cabin, Open Water, Nagara, The Locks, etc. Other bits are simply evocative and more impressionistic: Flow, Thaw, Sanctuary, Release. The entire work plays for about thirty-five minutes, and despite the considerable skill that obviously went into its crafting, it doesn’t seem to have much musical substance. It sounds like background, and presumably suits its purpose admirably, but you may well feel differently.

Also interspersed with the other items are four superbly made transcriptions from Philip Glass’s score to Aguas da Amazonia, easy on the ear and magnificently played. The last of them, Amazon River, brings the program to a satisfying conclusion. Finally, the players toss in a Zimbabwean song of the Shona people, Chigwaya, supposedly used to call water spirits. It’s charming, but also musically ephemeral. It would have been interesting to hear the song used as the basis for something more extended in form.

The bottom line here is that the performances are amazing, the music of variable quality but never gratuitously difficult or off-putting, and the engineering is perfect. You make the call.

– ClassicsToday (David Hurwitz)

Grammy-winning ensemble Third Coast Percussion releases their newest recording of two landmark works by acclaimed French composer Philippe Manoury. Manoury's work is aligned with the modernist French tradition as articulated by Pierre boulez; his music is imbued with values shared with the world of research and marked by ambitious instrumental challenges. His works has been particularly informed by his expertise in electro-acoustic composition and real-time interaction between acoustic instruments and computer generated sounds. In these two remarkable acoustic works, Le Livre des Claviers and Metal, Manoury explores the rich world of tuned keyboard percussion instruments, a category he broadens to include low pitched Thai gongs and a fascinating set of six homemade instruments called sixxen, originally imagined by pioneer Iannis Xenakis. Xenakis specified some sonic parameters for sixxen, but gave no specific instrument designs. Notably, pitch is not a fixed parameter in the design specifications for sixxen, so it is up to the performers to build instruments that create an engaging pitch landscape. The sixxen works, therefore, are shaped by Manoury's compelling rhythmic writing and elegant sense of contour, and a listener might be tempted to muse on ways the piece would sound different, or the same, with another set of sixxen. While Xenakis' use of these instruments was somewhat brutal, in Manoury's hands, they also display a ritualistic, etheral side, sounding occasionally like clanging church bells from the worship house of an exotic theology. Two movements for thai gongs and marimbas, a marimba duo, and a vibraphone solo represent the rest of Le Livre des Claviers, containing precise, demanding music that nevertheless avoids the kind of dramatic resistance often associated with writing of this complexity. The dynamic between the rigors of the mallet percussion movements of Le Levre des Claviers and the sixxen movements amounts to a kind of refraction of Manoury's vision through a distorting lens, particularly as it pertains to pitch. Present throughout all of these movements and in Metal is a natural, unencumbered flow underlying Manoury's phrases, even in the most virtuosic passages. This is, of course, a testament to Third Coast's well documented expertise, but also suggests that an affect of detached effortlessness may be shared with or influenced by his work in the realm of computer music. Perhap sit is consistent with Manoury's role as a researcher - a detached observer nevertheless infused with a sense of wonder.

John Cage’s vision of the future of music was first shaped by an intense creative period from 1935-1942, when he wrote many of the seminal works of percussion chamber music featured here. When he composed these works, the young Cage was basically the same age as the members of Third Coast Percussion.

This release includes all three of the groundbreaking Constructions. First Construction (in Metal) utilizes dozens of metal instruments which are beaten, scraped and shaken, creating an other worldly mixture of resonant sound unlike any heard before it. Second Construction prominently features one of Cage’s greatest inventions, the prepared piano. Finally, Third Construction brings the greatest degree of complexity and the widest range of instrumental timbres yet, creating one of the first landmark pieces in the percussion chamber music literature.

There are very few recordings of the early works Quartet and Trio.

The surprisingly beautiful sounds of everyday objects come forth in Third Coast Percussion’s recording of Living Room Music, recorded onsite at the futuristic Ford House in Aurora, IL, designed by one of America’s most iconoclastic architects, Bruce Goff, in 1947. Third Coast utilize the house itself as an instrument for the first movement.

Liner notes by Gregory Beyer and David Skidmore.

A 2020 double GRAMMY nominee, for both Best Small Ensemble/Chamber Music Performance and Best Engineered Album!

Grammy Award-winning, Chicago-based percussion quartet Third Coast Percussion teams up with influential, genre-defying multi-instrumentalist, record producer, songwriter, singer, and composer Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange) for an album of imaginative, evocative instrumental music created as the live soundtrack for choreography by the adventurous Hubbard Street Dance Chicago company. The album’s three works, all world-premiere recordings, represent Hynes’s debut on disc as a classical composer. In Perfectly Voiceless, Philip Glass-style minimalism gives way to a catchy pop melody. There Was Nothing blends synthesizer sounds with bowed mallet percussion instruments and moments of meditative lyricism recall the music of Lou Harrison. The expressive harmonies within the gauzy textures of For All Its Fury point to Hynes’ love of Debussy. Third Coast arranged Hynes’ music for its immense collection of diverse instruments and performed them on stage with the Hubbard Street dancers in Chicago and on tour. The Los Angeles Times praised Hynes’ “lush score” and Third Coast’s ability to summon “otherworldly sounds from a multitude of idiophones, drums and other devices.” Chicago’s New City Stage applauded Third Coast’s “extraordinary performance” and “ceaseless river of sound.”

REVIEW:

Third Coast Percussion grabs onto the Ambient Minimalism of the music of composer Devonte Hynes on the recent album Fields (Cedille CDR 90000 192), which creates universes of sound primarily out of mallet interlockings and ambient electronics. If New Music could remind you of some album track in Prog Rock, this could qualify for its cosmicality and spacey directedness.

This is New Music for people who may not much like New Music, or for those unfamiliar with such things. It is primarily good music beyond category.

I fully recommend this one for all progressive folks, for those who do not mind or even welcome a bit of groove and New Music fans who are open to the new in whatever form our artists see fit, regardless of preconceptions. Minimalists will also take heart I suspect. For this is very good indeed.

– Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review

The present collection of Augusta Read Thomas's works spans 18 years, from 1999 to 2017. It juxtaposes the two sides of Thomas that we've already encountered in previous volumes, the large-scale thinker in the cello concerto Ritual Incantations, the piano trio Klee Musings and the recent string quartet Chi, and the miniaturist in the six other works which on this disc act as satellites to the above-mentioned three larger works. Two sides that, paradoxically, seem to share more similarities than differences. Common to all the works collected here are the sunny, free-wheeling lyricism, luminosity, sense of colour, spontaneity, caprice, playfulness and spirituality which have long been ineradicable characteristics of her nuanced music, all tied up with an irrepressible energy and a sense of irreducible concision no matter how expansive the time frame, of taking all the time in the world to say everything that needs to be said in any given piece, but not a second more than that!

PERPETULUM

Multiple Grammy-winning Third Coast Percussion (TCP), praised by NPR for championing "borderless music" and "blurring musical boundaries, " celebrates it's 20th anniversary in 2025 with Standard Stoppages, an album inspired by pioneering conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp's idea of twisting standardized units, with works that redefine rhythmic structures and sonic possibilities. Reflecting on two decades-or a "score"-of music-making, the anniversary gives TCP the space to reflect on their many milestones, collaborations, and steps along the journey that have shaped their work over the years, inspiring the group to commission new works for the occasion. This diverse set of commissions makes for a colorful sonic palette of percussive ensemble works, ranging from Zakir Hussain's traditional Hindustani influence to Musekiwa Chingodza's Zimbabwean song to Jessie Montgomery's western contemporary approach. This project brings together both new and past collaborators; with commissioned works from Jlin and Zakir Hussain, alongside fresh contributions from Jessie Montgomery and Tigran Hamasyan. The late Zakir Hussain and the rich Hindustani and tabla traditions were strong sources of inspiration for Third Coast Percussion, most notably through the commissioned work Murmurs in Time. His unexpected passing between the album's recording and release moved TCP to dedicate this project to his memory and enduring legacy. Drawing from Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages, TCP's 7th recording for Cedille Records invites reflection on the varying paths that lead to unique creative expressions, both for themselves and their collaborators. Standard Stoppages was produced and engineered by Judith Sherman, Colin Campbell, and Bill Maylone. Tracks 1-4 and 7-10 were recorded November 4-8, 2024, and tracks 5-6 October 1-2, 2024, at Narwhal Studios, Chicago, IL; Track 11 was recorded November 15, 2024, at Rax Trax, Chicago, IL.