With Standard Stoppages, Third Coast Percussion celebrates its twentieth year of existence. As significant, the seventy-minute collection shows the Chicago-based quartet (Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, David Skidmore) upholding its commitment to new music with six pieces that are all recent commissions and world premiere recordings. It’s been a strong year for the group: in addition to this fine addition to its discography, TCP issued in early 2025 a stellar treatment of Philip Glass’s Aguas da Amazonia. Whereas that release appears on Rockwell Records, Standard Stoppages is the ensemble’s seventh on Cedille Records. Testifying to the group’s range, its first Cedille release, Steve Reich (2016), focused on the work of another seminal contemporary figure, while Paddle to the Sea (2018) drew for inspiration from the beloved 1966 film of the same name. The Reich release brought TCP a Grammy (for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance), and all four of its pre-Standard Stoppages Cedille recordings were nominated for awards too.

Among those who’ve been commissioned by the group are Glass, Missy Mazzoli, Clarice Assad, Augusta Read Thomas, Donnacha Dennehy, and Christopher Cerrone. For this latest collection, the group’s assembled a program featuring material by Jlin, Musekiwa Chingodza, Jessie Montgomery, Tigran Hamasyan, and the late Zakir Hussain. Appropriately for a release honouring the group’s two-decade run, Standard Stoppages deals with time, not only in the literal sense of time-keeping but also in the notion of time passing. The latter is felt no more pertinently and poignantly than in the death of Hussain as the album was being prepared for release (he recorded the material in studio with TCP in October 2024, weeks before his passing in December). To have been able to spend a year working with the great tabla master brought home to the quartet even more how precious the time is that we’re granted and that we share with others.

Following on from her earlier collaboration with TCP, Perspective (a 2023 Pulitzer-finalist, incidentally), is Jlin’s (Jerrilynn Patton) Please Be Still. The group asked her to create a new piece that would be a reimagining of one by a composer who inspires her, which prompted her to select material from J. S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor. The tone of Jlin’s reworking is endearingly childlike and enlivened by the incredible synchronicity the members have developed across twenty years. Her background in electronic music is evident in the intricate funk groove that snakes its way through the material and in the track’s infectious swing. Material so rousing invites anything but stillness as a response.

The first of two three-part works on the album, Hamasyan’s Sonata for Percussion looks to his past for the nostalgic reverie “Memories from Childhood” and draws also from his jazz background for its asymmetrical rhythm elements. Verging on lullaby-like, “Hymn” is naturally the work’s gentlest and most serene movement; “23 for TCP,” by comparison, is the most rhythmically forceful. As always, the presence of mallet instruments in a TCP performance allows for both melody and rhythm to be equally prominent; consequently, any listener thinking the music will concentrate on rhythm exclusively can set that notion aside. That said, TCP also doesn’t shy away from emphasizing rhythm, as attested to by the inclusion of drum kit playing.

Surprisingly, Murmurs in Time was Hussain’s only composition for a classical percussion group, despite the fact that his career was marked by numerous collaborations with percussionists. Like Hamasyan, Hussain draws from personal history by referencing childhood memories of him singing alongside his father and tabla player Ustad Alla Rakha. The Hindustani classical music tradition is evoked by percussive vocalizations that punctuate the first part, “Recitation,” and by an ever-expanding arrangement featuring tabla, Tibetan singing bowls, marimba, and other instruments from the TCP arsenal. In contrast to the first movement’s generally peaceful tone, the second opens with a burst of energy before settling into a medium-tempo flow of bowed vibraphone and tabla. As the movement unfolds, space is allowed for improvisation and individual soloing to occur, something less a factor in the album’s more through-composed settings.

Montgomery’s represented by two pieces, the first, Study No. 1, a dynamic, ceremonial-styled panorama, and the second, In Color Suite, a work in three short movements. After “Red” sets a brooding tone, “The Poet” brightens the proceedings with unusual timbres sourced from bowed marimba, melodica, and a gamelan-evoking vibraphone. Shimmering marimbas and whistling bolster the dreaminess of “Purple” to usher the work to a peaceful resolution. The album concludes with Dzoka Kumba by Zimbabwean artist Musekwai Chingodza, its title translating to “Come Back Home” and the piece written for the composer’s daughter as an invitation to return to the family home during a difficult time. The composer himself appears alongside TCP, his mbira and singing voice clearly audible alongside the quartet’s intricate web during this sunny closer. That the members of TCP have been together for twenty years is remarkable when most groups experience changes in membership over time. Nothing about Standard Stoppages suggests there’s any reason why the group won’t continue on when the performances are so vital and the members’ enthusiasm for new music is as passionate as ever.

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