Third Coast Percussion Ensemble spielt: Mallet Quartet, Sextet, Nagoya Marimbas, Music for Pieces of Wood. Total time 62 Min.

The “commandingly elegant” (New York Times) Third Coast Percussion makes its Cedille label debut with an 80th birthday salute to visionary American composer Steve Reich, a Pulitzer Prize winner and founding father of musical minimalism. An album of sonic delights, Third Coast Percussion | Steve Reich offers four of the composer’s most celebrated works for percussion. In the magical Mallet Quartet, vibraphone melodies unfold over marimba rhythms. Sextet, almost symphonic in scope with two pianos added to the percussion battery, is full of surprises. The short, Japanese-commissioned Nagoya Marimbas exhibits pentatonic coloration. Third Coast Percussion is joined by eighth blackbird’s Matthew Duvall for Music for Pieces of Wood, played on five wooden slats tuned to specific pitches for an astonishing variety of sounds.

Third Coast Percussion is “mysterious, funny, endlessly inventive and often exhilarating” (Boston Classical Review). Founded in 2005, the Chicago-based foursome comprises Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore. The ensemble’s critically acclaimed discography includes Augusta Read Thomas’s Resounding Earth on New Focus Recordings and David T. Little’s Haunt of Last Nightfall on the New Amsterdam label.

1. Nagoya Marimbas (1994)
2. Music for Pieces of Wood (1973)