Third Coast Percussion knows how to throw a party.
The Grammy Award-winning Chicago quartet made that evident last February, accompanying Twyla Tharp’s company for the West Coast premiere of Slacktide. Presented by Cal Performances, the event was part of a triumphant tour marking Tharp’s 60th anniversary as a choreographer. Back at Zellerbach Hall on Nov. 1, Third Coast was in the midst of celebrating works commissioned for its 20th year, and the program captured the rigorous, wide-open sensibility that has made the group a vital force in developing new repertoire for percussion.
The evening’s major work was Murmurs in Time, which Third Coast commissioned from Zakir Hussain — it is the tabla legend’s first work in this idiom. Hussain’s death last December at the age of 73 preempted the group’s scheduled tour with him, and they premiered the piece at the Grace Cathedral memorial in February with Salar Nader taking over his guru’s tabla chair (a role he’s continued to play at subsequent Third Coast performances).
Born in Hamburg to Afghan parents, Nader grew up in the Bay Area and studied with Hussain from the age of seven, which inspired the title of the tabla-centric piece that opened the concert’s second half. Third Coast’s Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore joined Nader for Seven, delivering a bravura performance that moved through various North Indian rhythmic cycles, building in intensity to a rising flourish and finishing together on a dime.
A video of an interview with Hussain conducted at the start of the Third Coast collaboration in 2024 played before Murmurs, offering a good deal of insight into the piece. Describing an education that started in infancy with rhythms chanted into his ear by his father, tabla giant Alla Rakha (1919–2000), Hussain talked about their early study sessions, conducted sans drums, in which Alla Rakha would recite patterns orally and he would sing them back.
The first half of Murmurs focused on these verbal tabla bols led by Nader and repeated by Third Coast, harkening back to Hussain’s childhood initiation. It’s a skill that Hussain often deployed at recitals to dazzling effect, but it’s one thing for Hussain to accompany his majestic tabla improvisations with bols and another entirely for Third Coast to adopt the practice. Without the sense of spontaneity that comes from improvisation, the bols passage soon wore out its welcome (as did the repetitive, eight-note chiming vibes figure that ran through the section).
The second half of Murmurs fully came to life, as Third Coast joined Nader on tabla with drum kit, vibraphone, and marimba, surging and rising through a sequence of cycles. Their precision, which felt natural and unstudied, spoke to the devotion with which they have absorbed Hussain’s ideas.
In a career brimming with landmark works encompassing Hindustani classical music, Indo-jazz, South and North Indian crossovers, film scores, and uncategorizable international collaborations, Murmurs in Time is more interesting for what it represents than as a work itself. It’s not an essential part of his legacy, but it speaks to his perpetual interest in bringing the tabla into new musical territory.
Like Third Coast’s latest album, Standard Stoppages, the concert opened with Jlin’s Please Be Still, a spacious, elegantly constructed piece partly based on the “Kyrie” from J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor. The disparate first half also featured violinist Jessie Montgomery’s playful, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink Lady Justice / Black Justice, The Song. The seemingly disconnected series of increasingly antic passages was more cutesy than engaging until the final two minutes, when justice arrived with a shimmering vibes-driven ascension marked by bright, luminous harmonies.
From the mischievous to the sublime, Armenian jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan’s three-part Sonata for Percussion concluded the first half, setting up an intriguing dialogue with Hussain’s Murmurs. The deep, woody marimba bass notes of the opening movement “Memories from Childhood” evoked loneliness and dark, mysterious forests. The brief middle movement, the beatific “Hymn,” found awe in those forbidding environs.
I can’t verify that the closing section, “23 for TCP,” was in 23/8 as announced, never having identified the cycle-starting “one.” But the slippery, interlocking lines, coordinated from the drum kit, maintained a steady, heady dialogue between wood and metal, marimba and vibes. Less a celebration, it was a steeplechase benediction for a group entering its third decade at the peak of their craft.
