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.

Danny Elfman’s Percussion Quartet, structured like a four-movement symphony, shares distinctive traits heard in his Grammy-winning, Oscar-nominated films scores, as well as hints of African balofon, Indonesian gamelan, and Shostakovich. Great admirers of composer Philip Glass, Third Coast arranged Glass’s solo piano Metamorphosis no.1 for marimba, vibraphone, glockenspiel, and melodica. Rubix emerged from Third Coast Percussion’s improvisational collaboration with virtuosic, cutting-edge flute duo Flutronix, who also perform on the recording. Critically acclaimed electronic musician and composer Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) composed her seven-movement Perspective as electronic tracks, without music notation. Third Coast transformed this work of “beautiful complexity” into a version they could perform live as a quartet.

Third Coast Percussion’s previous Cedille Records release, Archetypes, collaboratively composed and performed with guitarist Sérgio Assad and multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Clarice Assad, earned 2022 Grammy nominations in three categories: Best Contemporary Classical Composition, Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, and Best Engineered Album, Classical.

In 2017 the ensemble won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble performance for their Cedille recording of Steve Reich works for percussion. Third Coast received a 2020 nomination in the same category for Perpetulum (Orange Mountain) and a 2021 nomination for its Cedille album of music by Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange) titled Fields.

The ensemble maintains a busy tour schedule, with past performances in 38 of the 50 states and Washington, D.C., plus international tour dates in Canada, Colombia, Hong Kong, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.