From concert and album reviews to feature articles, Third Coast Percussion is in the news.
We are fortunate to have garnered critical acclaim and recognition for so many of our performances and projects. See for yourself what the buzz is all about by reading what the press has to say! Browse reviews, articles, and much more below.
Review: Nova Linea Musica Presents Third Coast Percussion Program, “The Drum Also Sings”
February 28, 2026, by Kathy D. Hey
Nova Linea Musica presented The Drum Also Sings, an hour long concert by Third Coast Percussion at the Merit School of Music on Wednesday. NLM and Third Coast Percussion are known for commissioning new work from Chicago musicians. The acoustically perfect Guarneri Hall is the usual location for NLM programs, but TCP has quite an array of instruments and sound-making devices that would leave no room for an audience. The Merit School of Music in the West Loop provided a perfect venue for a marimba, drums, and several other percussion instruments. The auditorium could also accommodate students from Merit, providing an inspiring experience and great enjoyment for future performers. Having met while students at Northwestern, TCP is a quartet of percussionists Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore. They have been playing together for 26 years and counting. One of the featured pieces of the evening was a brand…
ON the Beat | On the Plugged/Unplugged Trail
February 27, 2026, by Josef Woodard
In some circles, the worlds of digital music creation and the old-fashioned methodology — of hitting, plucking, bowing, and otherwise producing sound from physical instruments in real time — occupy their own separate orbits. But the twain can meet, and with artistically fruitful results, as heard at Campbell Hall last week. In this special case, a show hosted by UCSB Arts & Lectures (A&L), the skilled percussionist adventurers in the Chicagoan Third Coast Percussion (TCP) crossed paths with inspired minimalist electronician Jlin (born Jerrilynn Patton). Campbell Hall was duly transformed into an entrancing groove house, an artsy party zone. This was a special occasion for the performers and audience alike, a kind of warm-up and preview for both a recording project and a future official tour. If there remains any question that groove music and minimalism are or aren’t joined at the hip, this concert settled the debate. Aside from its predominant focus on music composed by Jlin — performed with…
Third Coast Percussion goes lean for premieres at Gottlieb Hall
February 26, 2026, by Landon Hegedus
Nova Linea Musica, one of Chicago’s most interesting new chamber music series, returned on Wednesday night with a performance by Chicago’s own contemporary percussion emissaries, Third Coast Percussion. Departing its usual venue at Guarneri Hall on this occasion for roomier digs at Merit School of Music’s Gottlieb Hall, the dynamic series’ directive remains the same: Engage artists to commission new works by living composers and premiere those works in an intimate, salon-esque setting. Third Coast Percussion, consisting of ensemble members David Skidmore, Sean Connors, Peter Martin, and Robert Dillon, was also in typically fine form on this outing. Wednesday evening’s program was a grab bag of modern percussion literature that spotlighted short, accessible, and conceptually focused works. Despite the more spacious outpost, Third Coast’s setup remained compact, at least by the ensemble’s standards. In fact, creative constraint was one of the themes of the program. This was particularly true of…
Drum Roles — Two decades in, Third Coast Percussion continues to push its sound in new directions.
January 31, 2026, by Jessi Roti
It's admittedly "a little silly" for all four members of Third Coast Percussion to gather around a single marimba, says founding member David Skidmore. But that's exactly the scenario the chamber music quartet asked rising composer JaRon Brown to create with the new work This Too Shall Pass. Skidmore describes "dancing around each other" to perform it, which undoubtedly necessitates some functional choreography. He adds, "JaRon's music is really thoughtfully put together, with a sense of lightness, fun, and whimsy." (Third Coast once performed a piece by the South Carolina composer that's meant to mimic the feeling of having butterflies in your stomach.) This Too Shall Pass gets its world premiere February 25 as part of Third Coast's concert at Gottlieb Hall in the West Loop. Taking on a new challenge is very much in the DNA of the acclaimed group, which celebrated two decades together in 2025. Its anniversary…
Third Coast Percussion pays tribute to the art and music of Bruce Goff
January 30, 2026, by Landon Hegedus
It’s not often that the disciplines of music and architecture are discussed meaningfully in the same breath. The maxim “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” is often aimed as a dig at music writing, but one can imagine that, to the iconoclastic 20th-century architect Bruce Goff, the phrase would read more like a credo. The multidisciplinary architect is the subject of a fascinating retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago titled Bruce Goff: Material Worlds. He was also the focal point of an equally compelling program presented by Third Coast Percussion at the Art Institute’s Rubloff Auditorium on Thursday evening. Goff (1904-82) is best known today as the patron saint of the “organicist” movement of architecture. Though a philosophical descendant and mentee of Frank Lloyd Wright, he eschewed the clean lines and minimalism of the modern zeitgeist in favor of curvilinear, often abstract designs. His attraction to non-traditional…
Bruce Goff Wasn’t Just an Architect – He Also Composed, Music Third Coast Percussion Concert Performs at the Art Institute
January 23, 2026, by Daniel Hautzinger
“I think he was a genius,” Sean Connors says as his quartet Third Coast Percussion wraps up a rehearsal of music by Bruce Goff, which they will perform at the Art Institute of Chicago on January 29 in association with the exhibit “Bruce Goff: Material Worlds.” While visiting the exhibit, Connors had been struck by Goff’s artistic output in various mediums: abstract paintings; the music Third Coast is rehearsing; and, most famously, idiosyncratic homes and buildings that include unconventional materials such as coal, rope, cast-off glass chunks, and sequins in imaginatively shaped structures. “He’s like Leonardo,” Connors continues, Da Vinci being another artist who dove into disparate fields with a curious, restless mind. But by the twentieth century, when Goff worked, such a multi-talented “Renaissance man” had become far less common as fields – perhaps especially architecture and classical music – specialized. Nevertheless, Goff was an outlier, and not just in his…
Best classical and jazz of 2025: Our top 10 included a tasty concept at Ravinia, improv and a ‘moving’ performance at the CSO
December 11, 2025, by Hannah Edgar
The best-run festival I encountered this year was Rhythm Fest, a blowout birthday bash for Third Coast Percussion in June. It dispensed with travel-and-ticketing headaches by posting up for just a day at the Epiphany Center for the Arts, utilizing six different spaces on the campus. It surely would have only worked for the kind of music the quartet assembled — solo and small-ensemble acts from its wide roster of collaborators — but boy, did it work.
Viet Cuong’s energetic music in the spotlight at Northwestern
November 15, 2025, by Katherine Buzard
Northwestern University’s Symphonic Wind Ensemble teamed up with acclaimed Chicago-based ensembles Third Coast Percussion, Eighth Blackbird, and ~Nois Quartet for a program showcasing the work of Viet Cuong on Friday night. The concert, titled “Vital Currents: The Music of Viet Cuong,” kicked off a weekend recording project of the Vietnamese-American composer’s work. Third Coast Percussion joined the stage for Re(new)al, a piece Cuong describes in his program note as “celebrating everyone who is working together to create a cleaner, more efficient world.” The concerto for percussion quartet is constructed of three continuous movements, each inspired by different types of renewable energy: hydro, wind, and solar. Hydro power was manifested by a set of crystal glasses, which Third Coast Percussion clinked together to create different chords. As in John and Jim, Cuong built up the texture gradually, adding tinkling piano, blowing air, and fluttering piccolo scales on top of the glass sonorities. The second…
Classical Album Review: Third Coast Percussion Turns 20 — “Standard Stoppages”
November 14, 2025, by Jonathan Blumhofer
“Surprise,” the Russian novelist Boris Pasternak once noted, “is the greatest gift which life can grant us.” Though the observation predates the formation of the quartet Third Coast Percussion by several decades, the sentiment applies well enough to Standard Stoppages, the group’s new album celebrating their 20th anniversary season. To be sure, the world of the percussion ensemble is an immensely varied one: pretty much anything that can be struck qualifies as an instrument. Accordingly, Stoppages is a veritable cornucopia of sounds experienced in multifarious combinations. Yet in works both big and small, its generous, nearly 80-minute-long program reveals a diversity of fresh, inventive, and satisfyingly expressive voices operating at full tilt. It is, if nothing else, one of the year’s most welcome, enjoyable musical surprises. The disc’s single biggest item (by about 30 seconds) is Tigran Hamasyan’s Sonata for Percussion. Cast in three movements that run the gamut from shimmying asymmetrical meters…
Want to catch up on the year’s best classical recordings? Start here.
November 12, 2025, by Michael Andor Brodeur
Dennehy’s inventiveness finds its rival in fellow Grammy nominees Third Coast Percussion, whose “Standard Stoppages” explores, exploits and explodes time in a more hands-on fashion. The album includes works by Jlin, Jessie Montgomery, Tigran Hamasyan, Zakir Hussain and Musekiwa Chingodza, each realized by the ensemble with lucid precision and a bit of wild abandon.
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