Percussion

Grammy Award-winning Chicago-based percussion quartet Third Coast Percussion (Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, David Skidmore) presents Between Breaths, an album of world premieres of works by four contemporary composers, plus a new work by the quartet itself.

Grammy Award-winning, Chicago-based percussion quartet Third Coast Percussion teams up with influential, genre-defying multi-instrumentalist, record producer, songwriter, singer, and composer Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange) for an album of imaginative, evocative instrumental music created as the live soundtrack for choreography by the adventurous Hubbard Street Dance Chicago company. The album’s three works, all world-premiere recordings, represent Hynes’s debut on disc as a classical composer. In Perfectly Voiceless, Philip Glass-style minimalism gives way to a catchy pop melody. There Was Nothing blends synthesizer sounds with bowed mallet percussion instruments and moments of meditative lyricism recall the music of Lou Harrison.

In 1781, the Zong – a British slave ship – left Ghana with twice the number it was designed to carry, bound for Jamaica. The ship’s owners claimed that drinking water was running low, and ordered the crew to throw more than 130 living enslaved people overboard.

Grammy Award-winning Third Coast Percussion, whose artistry blends “creative fearlessness with reverent precision” (BBC Music Magazine), offers an album of enterprising collaborations and world-premiere recordings of works written or arranged expressly for the Chicago-based percussion quartet, representing four different approaches to composing concert music.

Grammy Award-winning Third Coast Percussion, celebrated Brazilian guitarist Sérgio Assad, and his daughter, the vibrant vocalist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Clarice Assad, “a veritable musical dynamo” (San Francisco Classical Voice), join forces for a collaboratively written program conjuring a dozen universal archetypes — timeless characters shared by cultures around the globe.

The career of Buke & Gase, the duo of Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez, has one of the more idiosyncratic arcs of any band of the past two decades. Formed in 2008, they became a cult obsession shortly after the release of their first demo EP, with the left-field indie rock of that release and their first LP Riposte earning the attention of luminaries like The National and Lou Reed, and praise from the likes of Pitchfork and Radiolab (which featured the group on three episodes) and NPR (where they played one of the very first Tiny Desk Concerts).

Nonesuch Records releases an album of songs written and performed by Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion, Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part. The musicians, who have known each other since their student days, were presented with three days of gratis studio time and decided to experiment with ideas they had begun putting to tape during the sessions for their January 2021 Nonesuch release Narrow Sea. With Shaw on vocals and Sō—Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting—filling out this new band, they developed songs in the studio, with lyrics inspired by their own wide-ranging interests: James Joyce, the Sacred Harp hymn book, a poem by Anne Carson, the Bible’s Book of Ruth, the American roots tune “I’ll Fly Away,” and the pop perfection of ABBA, among others. The album is co-produced by Shaw, Sō Percussion, and the Grammy Award–winning engineer Jonathan Low (The National, Taylor Swift).