In a day-long festival of new music, Grammy Award winner Third Coast Percussion celebrated 20 years of making magical music in Chicago. In hosting Rhythm Fest, this percussion quartet of David Skidmore, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and Sean Connors brought together several of the composers with whom it has collaborated and local ensembles who have contributed to Chicago’s incredible contemporary music scene.

The venue was the Epiphany Center for Performing Arts on the Near West Side, within which there are several performance spaces that accommodate various musical activities taking place at the same time. Composers and artists who performed include Jlin, Jessie Montgomery, Conrad Tao, Tyondai Braxton, Clarice Assad, Ensemble Dal Niente, the saxophone quartet ~Nois, and, of course, Third Coast Percussion. The emphasis was on rhythm, and everyone provided something percussive in their performances.

A very enjoyable performance was offered by a string quintet headed by cellist and composer Tahirah Whittington upstairs in the Sanctuary. An unusual aspect of her quintet is the inclusion of an electric bass guitar, played by Janetta S. Hearne. The other players were Khelsey Zarraga and Edith Yokley on violin, Wilfred Farquharson on viola, and Whittington on cello. Prior to the performance, violinist and composer Jessie Montgomery interviewed Whittington, and in the middle of the set, the two played a duet together.

Whittington started with a solo Sarabande in b-minor, which she wrote with inspiration from the slow Sarabandes in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suites. It is a very interesting piece that includes some passages of counterpoint.

The full quintet performed several miniature Transitions based on spoken texts by poets yelley taylor and Tamara Crumble. The first, “Connections that reach beyond conception,” displayed some wonderful quartet writing with a chirpy, upbeat tune. The next one had the phrase, “I choose to use my inner child as a muse,” featured the bass guitar playing a downward melody that practically served as the basis for a passacaglia over which the other instruments played.

Downstairs in Epiphany Hall, Conrad Tao offered many rhythmic and percussive sounds on piano and electronica. He had the piano set up with lots of gadgets, and he played a very energetic piece.

Back upstairs, Clarice Assad provided a very different piano experience. She combines exquisite piano playing, scat vocalizations, and Brazilian roots into her own compositions and the Latin American composers she regularly performs.

On Saturday, she explained how she incorporates percussive techniques to her vocals, and showed the audience how it’s done. After playing some tunes by Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Jobim and Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, she turned to her own compositions using a vocoder that gave her vocals harmonies, echoes, reverb, and other effects.

Assad was one of the composers and performers Third Coast Percussion called upon to join their excellent performance of works that span their 20-year history. She provided the vocals to “Hero,” one of the pieces she wrote for Archetypes, a collaboration she and TCP did with her father, guitarist Sergio Assad.

As was typical for a TCP performance, the stage was filled with noisemaking gadgets, but the stage wasn’t big enough because instruments were placed in front of stage left and stage right. Movement is a big part of TCP concerts as each piece in a program requires different sets of instruments. Many require melodic marimbas, vibraphones, and other keyboard instruments played with mallets, so these are set nearest to stage center. Scattered around were drum kits, other drums, bongos, stands of handheld noisemakers, and electronic drum pads.

They gathered on stage left around the drum pads with composer Elori Saxl and performed a work with flowing sounds that she programmed. Sirens from Ashland Avenue out front seemed to be coming from the stage, and they were completely compatible with the other sounds being made.

From their recent CD on Cedille Records, Standard Stoppages, TCP performed Murmurs in Time by Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain, who died as they were finishing up the CD. On the tabla was one of Hussain’s students, Salar Nader.

To end their performance (but not the evening), TCP brought to the stage many of the composers and performers mentioned above, including Jessie Montgomery, Salar Nader, the saxophone quartet ~Nois (Brandon Quarles, Nathalia Warthen, János Csontos, and Julian Velasco), flautist Constance Volk from Ensemble Dal Niente, Ivan Trevino, and former TCP member Jacob Nissly. They performed Peter Martin’s arrangement of Madeira River by Phillip Glass, a different version of which opened their wonderful CD from 2018, Paddle to the Sea. The evening ended with a performance by Jlin.  

Kudos to Third Coast Percussion and their 20 years of making amazing music. They have contributed big time to Chicago’s rich musical landscape. Their next Chicago appearance will be with the Chicago Chamber Music Society on Wednesday, September 10, at 11:30 am. For more information, click here.

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