The Chicago quartet Third Coast Percussion is well-versed in high-profile, cross-genre collaborations.

In the 20 years since the group’s scrappy start as Northwestern University students, they have worked with leading composers, from the legendary Philip Glass to Chicago-based classical superstar Jessie Montgomery. They’ve also embraced less expected projects, like an evening-length work that combined percussion music with Memphis-meets-Miami–style street dance.

This week, Third Coast’s latest buzzy partnership arrives at Chicago’s Harris Theater after stops in Minneapolis, New York and Washington, D.C., that left plenty of critical praise in their wake. The three-night run features the percussionists (joined by flutist Constance Volk) playing a reimagined arrangement of a sweeping 1990s Philip Glass composition, paired with new choreography from the legendary dancemaker Twyla Tharp.

The performances are part of Tharp’s coast-to-coast tour celebrating 60 years as a revolutionary choreographer, and Third Coast is a key aspect of the show, using several special-made instruments from the pit. As the group prepares for its final North American shows with Tharp, ensemble member David Skidmore said the partnership has been “an education that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives.”

These shows are just one piece of Third Coast’s jam-packed year. The group is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a new album (out this Friday) and a one-day festival in Chicago this summer. Plus, they are hitting the road again soon, heading to South America and beyond.

Third Coast — which became the first-ever percussion ensemble to earn a Grammy Award with a win in 2017 — may have started as a group of students who just wanted to play more of the music they love. Two decades in, they are a dominant part of the new classical cannon.

Still, they haven’t lost touch with their Chicago roots, Skidmore recently told WBEZ’s Courtney Kueppers during an interview at Third Coast’s instrument-filled North Side studio. This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

Courtney Kueppers: How did this collaboration between Third Coast Percussion and the legendary dancemaker Twyla Tharp come to be?

David Skidmore: Third Coast has had an association with Philip Glass for several years now. We’ve been playing our arrangements of a piece of his called Aguas da Amazonia. Twyla and Philip got to talking about working together again, and Twyla brought up Aguas da Amazonia and Philip connected her with us, so that we could create a bespoke realization of that piece for her new dancework.

You reimagined that Glass work, Aguas da Amazonia, quite a bit for this collaboration with Tharp, right? What was that process like?

Third Coast got to work really, really closely with Twyla on the realization that became her dancework “Slacktied,” and our version of Aguas that goes along with that. So, you know, the order of the pieces, the pacing, some of the pieces we really drastically reimagined from their original version, because we were working with Twyla on the form that she had in mind.

It was a perfect project for Third Coast Percussion, because we really love it when a paradigm gets messed with in the service of something new and interesting. So, the idea that an existing work could be completely reborn, really in service of the dance, with the dance being the first priority, was just a lot of fun. And also, just to get to have conversations with Twyla about her creative process was an education that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives.

I mean, she’s the only choreographer we’ve ever worked with who kindly demanded that we give her a score while she was choreographing, which is so amazing. For us as musicians, and especially musicians who were going to be playing live with the show, to know how closely Twyla was following the form and the instrumentation and every moment of the music makes it a very special project for us.

How are you feeling about bringing this show home to Chicago and doing it here?

So excited — and it’s actually the last live performances that we’ll do on this tour. We have one more actually, in Venice in July, which of course we’re very excited about, but this North American run ends in Chicago. Which is bittersweet, of course, because it’s been an incredibly special project for us.

The dancers are phenomenal. Twyla’s team is amazing. Twyla herself is a living legend. So, to get to wrap it up in Chicago is beautiful, because we’ve been based here our entire careers. To get to play for our friends, family and hometown crowd always means so much to us.

You are on the road so much. You were just in Washington, D.C., at the Kennedy Center and leave soon for South America. Why is it important for you all to maintain your Chicago connections? You are intentional about doing shows here too.

We do make a deliberate effort to bring all of our big projects to Chicago. If there’s not a space for them in one of the presenting organizations in the city, we put it on ourselves to do it, because it’s home and we care about the people here.

I started undergraduate studies at Northwestern in 2001, and I’ve really lived here most of my life since then. So, it’s a place that I love, and it’s a phenomenal place to live as an artist. Because it’s a large, cosmopolitan city, with all that that has on offer, and it costs about half as much to live as New York or London or Tokyo or San Francisco or Seattle. And I think that that really affects the art that comes out of here. I think people take more risks here.

There’s also just a wonderful support system for the arts in the city. I’m not saying there aren’t incredible challenges, and there could always be more support and more championing of the arts that come out of this city, but for us, it’s been a perfect place to be home.

Your new album, Standard Stoppages, is out this week. Tell me a little bit about this project. How did it come to be?

In celebrating our 20th anniversary, we’ve got these major kind of tentpole projects that we’re doing, and a lot of those projects culminate in our new album that comes out this Friday.

For that album, we reached out to a couple of our favorite collaborators from the past to ask them to write new works for us. That’s Jlin and Musekiwa Chingodza. And we also sort of shot the moon and asked some musical heroes if they would write new pieces for us. So, that’s Tigran Hamasyan, Jessie Montgomery and the late Zakir Hussain [who died in December].

It’s an album that is sort of unified in its look at time. Of course, we’re a bunch of drummers, so we think about time all the time, in the sense of how it can be manipulated and become interesting musically. But we told all the composers who wrote for us what this album was all about and what the impetus was, so each composer looked to the past in their own way to unify the album.

One of the things that it makes me think of is just: How you measure 20 years and what does that even mean? You can take that length of time and feel like it’s both a lifetime and like we’d played our first concert practically yesterday.

Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.

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