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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.
Night After Night: Everything, all at once.
February 24, 2025, by Steve Smith
Anyone could see that composer and violinist Jessie Montgomery has seemed mighty busy just lately, but an email that showed up yesterday put everything into perspective. Here in New York City this week, she’s got a new piece on the high-profile recital Julia Bullock is presenting tonight at Lincoln Center and a Composer Spotlight program at The Juilliard School. (You’ll find details in The Night After Night Watch, below). Above and beyond those choice gigs, Montgomery has got a whole lot more coming up, here and beyond. Third Coast Percussion presents the New York premiere of Montgomery’s Lady Justice/Black Justice, The Song, along with works by Jlin, Tigran Hamasyan, and the late Zakir Hussain, in a Zankel Hall program on February 27. Montgomery also has a new piece on a big recital by 2025 Grammy winner Karen Slack – about whom, read Olivia Giovetti – at the 92nd Street Y…
SF Classical Voice: Celebrating the Bay Area Legacy of Legendary Tabla Player Zakir Hussain
, by Andrew Gilbert
As an arts journalist who’s often gotten the chance to interview musicians I deeply admire, I’ve had cause to reflect on the adage “Never meet your heroes. They’ll surely disappoint.” Some encounters have revealed the kernel of wisdom in this cautionary advice, but these have been the exception rather than the rule. More often, I come away impressed and elevated by my conversations with artists. And if any pedestaled figure left me feeling just that way, it was tabla legend Zakir Hussain, whose death in December 2024 at the age of 73 is still hard to comprehend. Since the mid-1990s, across more than a dozen interviews that I conducted with him and twice that many performances in an array of musical settings that I attended, he was the musician whose presence was the most profoundly enthralling. Far more than a cross-cultural musical explorer and eloquent champion of Hindustani and Carnatic…
The Michigan Daily: Twyla Tharp Dance and Third Coast Percussion’s contemporary artistry at the Detroit Opera House
, by Tara Wasik
On Feb. 1 and Feb. 2, Twyla Tharp Dance celebrated part of its 60th-anniversary Diamond Jubilee tour with Third Coast Percussion and pianist Vladimir Rumyantsev at the Detroit Opera House. The first half consisted of Tharp’s Olivier-nominated “Diabelli,” set to Beethoven’s Diabelli, variations with Rumyantsev at the helm. After intermission, a new arrangement of Phillip Glass’ Aguas da Amazonia was played by Third Coast Percussion and flutist Constance Volk to premiere SLACKTIDE, a work to commemorate Tharp’s six decades of choreographing. With an all-black background, dancers in tuxedo-printed leotards pranced onto stage, and the show began. With only a solo piano riffing it to Beethoven, the jazzy choreography spoke for itself. Theatricality was in full swing as the dancers mimicked actions of gossip and chatter. The experience mirrored watching “Downton Abbey” when the nosy characters would scheme and plot. The duos were best, with enviable partner-work that solidified the audiences’…
VPM: Third Coast Percussion visits the Modlin Center Friday night
, by Mike Goldberg
Third Coast Percussion, the Grammy Award-winning percussion quartet will kick off their 20th anniversary tour this Friday evening (2/21) at 7:30pm in the Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond. The highlighted work on the program is "Murmurs in Time," composed by the late tabla master Zakir Hussain. The Modlin Center for the Arts is the lead commissioner for the piece, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Third Coast Percussion and they are honored to host the world premiere of this work. This tour was originally planned with the composer, but his recent passing forced a change in plans. With the family's blessing, Third Coast Percussion is moving forward with the tour as a tribute to Hussain. Tabla virtuoso Salar Nader, a disciple of Hussain's, will perform the "Murmur's in Time" with the ensemble. I recently caught up with group member and Executive Director David Skidmore to find out more about…
Los Angeles Times: Twyla Tharp at her best in ‘Aguas da Amazonia’ premiere with Philip Glass score
February 17, 2025, by Mark Swed
When Martha Graham founded her company 100 years ago, she instigated a dance revolution in America. We’ve now had a century of modern dance, led by the likes of Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine and many others whose modernism delved into the very essence of the body’s ability to express the ineffable. One of the key modernist figures formed her dance company 60 years ago as a motley troop of five women who danced spontaneously outdoors for passersby. It was, after all, the 1960s. But the diamond jubilee tour of Twyla Tharp Dance, which began a series of Southern California performances in Santa Barbara on Tuesday night, gradually evolved into one of the country’s most popular companies, taking dance into a new and surprising direction. Over those six decades, Tharp had her ups and downs — the company disbanded and reformed. But neither she nor her often startling dancers (star ballerina…
Little Village: Twyla Tharp brings 1999’s ‘Diabelli’ back to Hancher as the legendary choreographer celebrates her ‘Diamond Jubilee’
February 6, 2025, by Eric Durian
Despite two decades of dance training, most of my context for Twyla Tharp’s Diamond Jubilee at Hancher last Wednesday night came courtesy of an undergraduate dance history class on the choreographer and her eponymous company. That she was part of my dance curriculum speaks to how well known Tharp is in American modern dance, known for blending ballet lines, goofy humor and contemporary styles into her work. According to the program, Tharp has choreographed 169 pieces, including a Broadway musical and two figure-skating routines (which are disappointingly not on YouTube; I checked). Her work has been in the repertory of some of the biggest dance companies in the country. Wednesday’s bill featured Diabelli — co-commissioned by Hancher in 1998, it premiered in the pre-flood auditorium the follow year — and SLACKTIDE, a new piece created in 2024 by Tharp, who is now an octogenarian. The juxtaposition of these two works…
The Minnesota Star Tribune: Twyla Tharp Dance’s 60th anniversary show marked by moments of playfulness, surprise
January 30, 2025, by Sheila Regan
In front of a packed house at Northrop on Sunday, Twyla Tharp Dance launched its Diamond Jubilee, a coast-to-coast tour of the celebrated choreographer. For the performance, the dance company performed two expansive works set to live music that highlighted the choreographer's intensive interest in pattern, repetition and structure. Opening the show was the revival of Tharp's "Diabelli" (1998), set to Ludwig van Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations," performed live by pianist Vladimir Rumyantsev. The Diabelli of the title refers to Anton Diabelli, a well-known composer in Beethoven's time. He had written a waltz theme and sent it to all the top composers, with a plan to publish their variations and donate the proceeds to widows and orphans of the Napoleonic wars. Instead of composing just one variation, Beethoven composed 33. Beethoven's composition breaks down Diabelli's waltz into its structural make-up, then expands on those building blocks. Similarly, Tharp strips waltz dancing…
Gramophone: GLASS Águas da Amazônia Album Review
January 27, 2025, by Pwyll ap Siôn
There’s nothing else quite like Águas da Amazônia in Philip Glass’s catalogue of works. Originally composed in 1993 as incidental music for a dance production by the Brazilian dance company Grupo Corpo, the multi-movement suite – each one named after a river in the Amazon basin – is scored for a non-standard group comprising percussion, synthesiser and flute. While the instrumentation partly suggests Glass’s ensemble works of the 1970s and early 1980s, its use of marimba, vibraphone, glockenspiel and more unusual-sounding percussion instruments sets it apart from what one might expect from the composer. These unique qualities were already noted by Ivan Moody when he reviewed Uakti’s original recording (Philips, 7/02), where he observes that Águas da Amazônia ‘opens a new perspective on the composer’. Third Coast Percussion’s new recording injects further life and colour into this intriguing work. A change in the order of the movements imparts a more…
Chicago Classical Review: Third Coast Percussion infuses Winter Chamber Fest with vibrant energy
January 14, 2025, by John von Rhein
Presenting chamber groups in classical configuration has been the stock in trade of the Northwestern University Winter Chamber Music Festival since the series’ inception nearly two decades ago. But the 28th season demanded an add-on concert to honor the 20th anniversary of Third Coast Percussion. The ensemble’s four founding members are all Northwestern alumni, having met there in 2005 when they formed the internationally celebrated ensemble that played to a packed Pick-Staiger Concert Hall on the Evanston campus Saturday night. The stage was arrayed with a veritable arsenal of pitched and unpitched mallet percussion that lent an intriguing visual dimension to a stimulating program of mostly new music whose rhythmic asymmetries and textural complexities were like mother’s milk to TCP’s astonishing resident virtuosos David Skidmore, Peter Martin, Robert Dillon and Sean Connors: The more intricate the music, the more incisive and precise their reflexes. The majority of pieces centered around, but were…
Take Effect: Between Breaths Album Review
July 12, 2024, by Tom Haugen
10/10 The Chicago Quartet Third Coast Percussion never disappoint, and this time we’re treated to 5 world premiere recordings by 4 modern composers. Missy Mazzoli’s “Millennium Canticles” opens the listen with the atypical percussive sounds being both mysterious and firm, where wordless vocals add much to the creative climate, and “In Practice”, by the band, follows with a pair of movements that emit a distinct melody that radiates much warmth. The middle track belongs to Tyondai Braxton’s “Sunny X”, where forceful, sci-fi manipulation comes quickly and unpredictably in the rhythmic landscape, while “Triple Point”, by Ayanna Woods, brings dreamy mallet work amid a hypnotic beat. The last piece, Gemma Peacocke’s “Deathwish”, is full of curious and harmonic patterns that interpret sound in iconoclastic and innovative ways. There’s a reason why Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin and David Skidmore, i.e. Third Coast Percussion, have picked up a Grammy Award; their…
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