DIGITAL REVIEW — For its 20th anniversary album, Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion quartet thought they would deal with differing conceptions of time itself: the ground on which percussionists stake their place in the scheme of things. They had assembled an international trio of composers whom they had always wanted to work with — Armenia’s Tigran Hamasyan, Chicago’s Jessie Montgomery, India’s Zakir Hussain — plus two more (Jlin from nearby Gary, Ind., and Zimbabwe’s Musekiwa Chingodza) with whom they had worked before. They even got Hussain, who had never written a piece for a classical percussion ensemble until now, to perform on their disc.

But the celebration sadly turned into a memorial: Hussain, the heir to his father Alla Rakha as the world’s most noted tabla virtuoso, died in December 2024, just two months after his recording sessions with the group. In any case, his piece, Murmurs in Time, occupies the central place in this highly listenable collection of world premieres.

Divided into two halves lasting about 11 minutes apiece, Murmurs opens in Hindustani classical fashion with vocal syllables that set the music’s rhythmic patterns over the drones of Hussain’s tapped tablas and presumably overdubbed tanpura drones. Part Two becomes a fusion of Western mallet percussion and Eastern tabla patterns. Everything is low-key and sparely presented, the mallet licks playing comfortably off Hussain’s intricate tabla work before the energy picks up at the end.

Jlin’s leadoff piece, Please Be Still, based on passages from J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor, is a pleasing minimalist miniature that just grooves along, an appetizer for the rest of the program. The first movement of Mansurian’s Sonata for Percussion, Memories from Childhood, continues the light-hearted mood of Please Be Still — melodic and syncopated, though with repeated hints of the Dies irae motif casting slight shadows. The second movement, “Hymn,” is subdued and ruminative, though it doesn’t really sound like a hymn, and the finale, “23 for TCP,” is an attractive series of off-kilter dances in the head-scratching (for Western players) meter of 23/8!

Montgomery’s Study No. 1 begins with a low rumble turning into rapid droplets of tapped drums and muffled jingles. At first, it sounds like a Morton Subotnick electronic piece until the drums start rumbling and crotales warp their pitches, reminding us that all of this is being done with acoustic instruments. In her equally brief In Color Suite, “Red” finds the mallets murmuring again, “The Poet” has a bass marimba softly undergirding the other mallet players with an ostinato, and “Purple” is even more subdued, complete with whistling.

Finally, Chingodza’s Dzoka Kumba rounds out the eclectic program with good old-fashioned tonic-to-subdominant-to-tonic-to-dominant (I-IV-I-V) township jive from southern Africa, utilizing Third Coast’s mallets, a drum kit, the distorted shaker sound of the hosho, and the vocals of the composer. It jiggles irresistibly like the best southern African pop music, and it’s my favorite track of the lot.

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