Third Coast Percussion
Salar Nader, tabla

Jlin
Please Be Still
Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) has quickly become one of the most distinctive composers in America and one of the most influential women in electronic music. Her thrilling, emotional, and multidimensional compositions have earned her praise as “one of the most forward-thinking contemporary composers in any genre” (Pitchfork). Jlin is a recipient of a 2023 US Artist award and a 2023 Pulitzer Prize nomination. Her mini-album Perspective was released to critical acclaim on Planet Mu 2023, and her much-lauded albums Dark Energy (2015) and Black Origami (2017) have appeared on “Best of” lists in the New York Times, The Wire, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, the UK’s Guardian, and Vogue. Jlin has been commissioned by Third Coast Percussion, the Kronos Quartet, and the Pathos Quartet; choreographers Wayne McGregor and Kyle Abraham; fashion designer Rick Owens; and the visual artists Nick Cave and Kevin Beasley. Her latest release, Akoma (Planet Mu, March 2024) features collaborations with Philip Glass, Björk, and Kronos Quartet.

Third Coast Percussion (TCP) has worked with Jlin on a number of projects since 2019, including the seven-movement suite Perspective, which was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music. True to the title of that work, the collaborative process that Jlin and TCP have developed involves Jlin composing an entire work electronically, sometimes using samples of TCP’s instruments, which are then passed to the players to reimagine through their own lens for live performance on percussion instruments.
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For its 20th anniversary, the Third Coast Percussion asked Jlin to add another layer to the musical chain, by creating a new work that would be a remix or reimagining of a work by another composer who inspires her.

About Please Be Still, Jlin writes:

I’m always so delighted when I get to collaborate with Third Coast Percussion. When they asked me to compose a piece that was Bach-based, I—of course—jumped right to it. The Bach piece I chose to derive from is the Kyrie Eleison from Bach’s Mass In B minor. That piece has so many rhythmic sections with endless possibilities. I’ve been a lover of Bach’s music since I was a kid, and always found his work complicated. The percussionist in me hears Bach’s keystrokes as if they were individual acoustic drums. I’m always trying to play against the rhythm, and this piece was no different.

Third Coast Percussion’s album Standard Stoppages, released on Cedille Records in 2025, includes Jlin’s Please Be Still as well as the works by Zakir Hussain and Tigran Hamasyan featured on this program, and music by Jessie Montgomery and Musekiwa Chingodza.

Please Be Still was commissioned by Third Coast Percussion for its 20th anniversary, with support from Carnegie Hall, the Zell Family Foundation, the Robert and Isabelle Bass Foundation, the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, the Julian Family Foundation, and Steph and Daniel Heffner.

Jessie Montgomery
Lady Justice/Black Justice, The Song
Jessie Montgomery is a Grammy Award-winning composer, violinist, and educator whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Her profound works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful, and exploding with life” (The Washington Post) and are performed regularly by leading orchestras, ensembles, and soloists around the world. In June 2024, Montgomery concluded a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer in Residence. In 2025, she was named Performance Today’s Classical Woman of the Year.

A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Montgomery is a frequent and highly engaged collaborator with performing musicians, composers, choreographers, playwrights, poets, and visual artists alike. At the heart of her work is a deep sense of community enrichment and a desire to create opportunities for young artists and underrepresented composers to broaden audience experiences in classical music spaces.

Montgomery has been recognized with many prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence and Sphinx Virtuosi Composer in Residence, the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year.
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About Lady Justice/Black Justice, The Song, Montgomery writes:

Lady Justice/Black Justice, The Song is inspired by the artwork of Ori G. Carino and a reflection on his painting “Black Justice” (2020–22), which is a commentary on the injustices Black people continue to face at the heart of US social order and politics. The subject is a Romanesque statue of Lady Justice, depicted as a Black woman, and she is painted using airbrush techniques upon several layers of silk, which are then stretched in staggered alignment across a life-sized canvas. The painting is placed in the center of the room with a light cast through it so that one can view the image on a 360-degree plane and observe the holographic effect that results from the silk layering, revealing her timelessness and multiple hues. The image is staggering, aspirational, and technically virtuosic.

My approach was to try and interpret the painting from several angles, working in concert with Ori’s natural sense of beauty and grit, drawing musical correlations with the textures, techniques employed, and emotional qualities that spoke to me in the artwork. The main melody that appears throughout—which harkens to a Brahms-inspired theme that I wrote years ago, itself inspired by a line in Langston Hughes’ epic poem “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz”*—serves as a thread, reflecting the changing modalities in each section. I use special effects, such as dipping tuned crotales (weighted metal discs) into bowls of water to sonically reference the tipping of scales; the drum set part holds down an omnipresent breakbeat that bends and shapes the grungier middle section; and I interpret the holographic elements using various analogue musical delay effects. As the title suggests, this piece can be considered a companion to the painting and vice versa.

This piece represents a deep collaboration and artistic symbiosis between myself, Third Coast Percussion, and Ori. I am privileged to call them friends in music and in life.

* From “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz,”
by Langston Hughes:
“…A whirl of whistles blowing
No trains or steamboats going—
Yet Lyontene’s unpacking.
In the quarter of the Negros
Where the doorknob lets in lieder
More than German ever bore…”

Lady Justice/Black Justice, The Song was commissioned by Third Coast Percussion for its 20th anniversary, with support from the Zell Family Foundation, Carnegie Hall, Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa, Stanford Live (Stanford University), The Robert and Isabelle Bass Foundation, the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, the Julian Family Foundation, Steph and Daniel Heffner, and Third Coast Percussion’s New Works Fund.

Tigran Hamasyan
Sonata for Percussion (2024)
Tigran Hamasyan is considered one of the most remarkable and distinctive jazz-meets-rock pianists/composers of his generation. A piano virtuoso with groove power, Hamasyan seamlessly fuses potent jazz improvisation and progressive rock with the rich folkloric music of his native Armenia. Born in Gyumri, Armenia, in 1987, Hamasyan’s musical journey began in his childhood home, where he was exposed to a diverse array of musical influences that lead to him playing piano at the age of three, performing in festivals and competitions by the time he was 11, and winning the Montreux Jazz Festival’s piano competition in 2003. He released his debut album, World Passion, in 2004 at the age of 17. The following year, he won the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition. Additional albums include New Era; Red Hail; A Fable, for which he was awarded a Victoires de la Musique (the equivalent of a Grammy Award in France); Shadow Theater; and Luys i Luso, which featured the Yerevan State Chamber Choir and focused on Armenian sacred music stretching stylistically from the 5th century to the 20th century.

Hamasyan’s Nonesuch debut, Mockroot (2015), won the Echo Jazz Award for International Piano Instrumentalist of the Year; subsequent recordings for the label include An Ancient Observer (2017) and the companion EP, For Gymuri (2018); Revisiting the Film (2021); and, most recently, StandArt (2022). Hamasyan received the Deutscher Jazzpreis international category in Piano/Keyboards in 2021. He has also released recordingss on France’s Plus Loins, Universal France, Nonesuch, and ECM.

Hamasyan’s new conceptual album, The Bird of a Thousand Voices, was released in August 2024 on Naïve/Believe—his debut recording for the label. He composed, scored, and arranged the much-anticipated project, which is inspired by an ancient Armenian folk tale, and includes an interactive game (www.bird1000.com) and a transmedia music-theater piece that premiered at the Holland Festival in June 2024.

In addition to awards and critical acclaim, Hamasyan has built a dedicated following worldwide, earning praise from artists including Herbie Hancock, Brad Mehldau, and the late Chick Corea. “With startling combinations of jazz, minimalist, electronic, folk, and songwriterly elements… Hamasyan and his collaborators travel musical expanses marked with heavy grooves, ethereal voices, pristine piano playing and ancient melodies. You’ll hear nothing else like this” (NPR).

While he has built a career as a performer of his own music, Hamasyan’s work has started to be available to other performers in recent years, first as sheet music of his solo piano works transcribed from his recordings, and now in the form of new compositions written for other performers. In particular, he seems a natural choice for composing for a contemporary percussion ensemble, as his creative voice plays with extremely complex rhythmic cycles.

Hamasyan’s Sonata for Percussion is very classical in some ways—it has three distinct movements (fast–slow–fast) and it is abstract music, evoking moods but not telling a specific story. Lilting dance feels, arpeggiated harmonies, and ornamented melodies give an additional wink to the classical, but the vocabulary is pure Hamasyan, with the moments of hard-grooving energy or ghostly lyricism winding their way through an asymmetrical rhythmic landscape. The outer movements both explore different subdivisions of 23-beat rhythmic cycles, while the middle movement is in a (relatively) tame seven.

Working through this material—both in workshops with the composer during the creative process and in rehearsals for the premiere—was an exhilarating but humbling experience for the members of TCP, who had to work to develop the unique skill set that Tigran has built with his band, in order to fit together the rhythmic jigsaw puzzle in a way that grooves and allows the character of the musical lines to shine through.

Tigran Hamasyan’s Sonata for Percussion was commissioned by Third Coast Percussion for its 20th anniversary, with support from Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting, the Zell Family Foundation, the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, the Julian Family Foundation, and Steph and Daniel Heffner.

Zakir Hussain
Murmurs in Time
The pre-eminent classical tabla virtuoso of his time, Zakir Hussain (1951–2024) was appreciated both in the field of percussion and in the music world at large as an international phenomenon and one of the world’s most esteemed and influential musicians. The foremost disciple of his father, the legendary Ustad Alla Rakha, Hussain was a child prodigy who began his professional career at the age of 12, accompanying India’s greatest classical musicians and dancers and touring internationally with great success by the age of 18. His brilliant accompaniment, solo performance, and genre-defying collaborations—including his pioneering work to develop a dialogue between North and South Indian musicians—elevated the status of his instrument both in India and globally, bringing the tabla into a new dimension of renown and appreciation.

Widely considered a chief architect of the contemporary world music movement, Zakir’s contribution was unique, with many historic and groundbreaking collaborations, including Shakti, Remember Shakti, Masters of Percussion, Planet Drum and Global Drum Project with Mickey Hart, Tabla Beat Science, Sangam with Charles Lloyd and Eric Harland, Crosscurrents with Dave Holland and Chris Potter, in trio with Béla Fleck and Edgar Meyer, and, most recently, with Herbie Hancock.

As a composer, he scored music for numerous feature films, major events, and productions. He composed three concertos, and his third, the first-ever concerto for tabla and orchestra, was premiered in India in 2015 by the Symphony Orchestra of India; first heard in Europe the following year; and then debuted in the US in 2017 by the National Symphony Orchestra at Kennedy Center. A Grammy winner, Hussain received countless awards and honors, including the Padma Vibhushan, Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the USA’s National Heritage Fellowship, and Officier in France’s Order of Arts and Letters. Voted “Best Percussionist” by both the Downbeat Critics’ Poll and Modern Drummer’s Reader’s Poll over several years, Hussain was honored in 2018 by the Montreal Jazz Festival with its Antônio Carlos Jobim Award. Hussain received several honorary doctorates and, in 2019, became a Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellow, a rare lifetime distinction afforded to only 40 artists at a time by India’s reigning cultural institution. Hussain was the 2022 Kyoto Prize laureate in arts and philosophy, awarded by the Inamori Foundation to “those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment of mankind.” Hussain became the first musician from India to receive three Grammy Awards at one time at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards on February 4, 2024—for Best Global Music Album, Best Global Music Performance, and Best Contemporary Instrumental Album.

As an educator, Hussain conducted many workshops and lectures each year. He was in residence at Princeton University and Stanford University, and, in 2015, was appointed Regents Lecturer at UC Berkeley. His yearly workshop in the San Francisco Bay Area, which was conducted regularly for 30 years, became a widely anticipated event for performers and serious tabla students. He was the founder and president of Moment Records, an independent record label presenting rare live concert recordings of Indian classical music and world music. Hussain was resident artistic director at SFJAZZ from 2013 until 2016 and was honored with SFJAZZ’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, in recognition of his “unparalleled contribution to the world of music.”
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Murmurs in Time represents Hussain’s only composition for a classical percussion group, though his career was filled with collaborations with percussionists of all kinds as well as explorations of the special bond between “fellow rhythmists.” This two-movement work echoes with memories of his own personal history and the path he traveled as he grew into one of the world’s most revered musicians.

Hussain’s musical journey started from the time he was a very small child, with his father and guru, the famous tabla player Alla Rakha, singing rhythms for the young Hussain to sing back. These vocalizations of drum sounds (“bols”) are an important element of the Hindustani classical music tradition. They can be a way to internalize rhythmic patterns independent of physical technique and become virtuosic displays in their own right. In particular, a rhythmic cycle used in the second movement of Murmurs in Time was a pattern that Hussain learned when he was about 11 years old. He visualizes this pattern, which underlies the last section of the piece, as a series of orbits within a solar system, circling the same sun at different speeds. The move toward faster circles propels the music forward.

This collaboration involved a balance of strictly composed material and opportunities for improvisation. In his typical generosity of spirit, Hussain thought of the piece as an interaction; an opportunity for mutual learning rather than a channel for imposing his will on the other performers. “It is important that the respect is given to the artists that I’m working with, by allowing them to be able to find their own way in the piece that I’m presenting…. I love to see how it comes back to me in a different costume.”

Hussain worked with Third Coast Percussion as he developed Murmurs in Time, through a series of workshops and rehearsals throughout the course of 2024, and the five recorded this new work together in October of that year. The members of TCP were crushed to learn of his passing just two months later, as the album was being prepared for release, and are endlessly grateful that they had the opportunity to work with this musical hero and record this work together for posterity. To continue to share this music with the world, Salar Nader, one of Zakir’s most prominent students, has joined TCP for performances in 2025 and beyond.

Murmurs in Time by Zakir Hussain was commissioned by Third Coast Percussion for its 20th anniversary, with support from the Zell Family Foundation, Modlin Center for the Arts at University of Richmond, Carnegie Hall, Washington Performing Arts, the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, the Julian Family Foundation, and Steph and Daniel Heffner.