by Nicholas Stevens
Few composers in the classical tradition have successfully transformed stories for children into engrossing all-ages artworks. In a concert at the Cleveland Museum of Art last week, Third Coast Percussion — the Chicago-based quartet of Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore — made a strong case for their new work, Paddle to the Sea.
by Jarrett Hoffman
Third Coast Percussion went bold with their latest project, a sprawling marine ecosystem of an album titled Paddle to the Sea. The name comes from a 1966 film about a wooden toy boat floating its way from Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean. After the half-hour film was brought to the group’s attention, they group-composed a new score to it, here receiving its world-premiere recording.
by Jarrett Hoffman
A Native Canadian boy in the Nipigon country of Ontario dreams of a journey he knows he can’t make. But a figure carved out of cedar, with a strip of lead to keep it upright in the water, and a message inscribed on the bottom to please return it to the water? That might just make it all the way through the Great Lakes, down Niagara Falls, past Quebec City, to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and beyond — despite encounters with a snake, a forest fire, passing ships, pollution, and people along the way.
That’s the tale of Bill Mason’s beautiful film Paddle to the Sea (1966), based on an award-winning children’s book and nominated for an Oscar. You can watch the 28-minute movie here, via the National Film Board of Canada. But you’ll want to take it in again this weekend, when a Chicago-based, Grammy-winning percussion quartet visits the Cleveland Museum of Art.
by Jarrett Hoffman
With their latest album, The Book of Keyboards, Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion drops you into another world. The inhabitants: six bafflingly good players, one revelatory composer in Philippe Manoury, a family of four tuned percussion instruments, and you — and after hearing this music there’s no going back.
by Daniel Hautzinger
Rhythm. It’s the first thing that pops into someone’s head when they hear the word “percussion.” But percussion is such a broad term that it can stretch far beyond just playing beats. Third Coast Percussion’s packed CMA concert at Transformer Station on January 19 provided many such examples of percussion’s fantastic versatility.
Surrounded by paintings in Transformer Station’s gallery space, Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, David Skidmore, and their setup of bells, marimbas, drums, bottles, and wood planks could have been an art exhibit themselves. The evening began in a more “traditional” percussion vein (whatever that means when a percussionist can be called on to play everything from a snare drum to a train whistle) with former Third Coast member Owen Clayton Condon’s Fractalia (2012). Numbering Steve Reich, electronica, and Taiko drumming among its influences, the piece is thrilling with oscillating marimba lines and bombastic drum solos, sounding almost like a song the progressive rock band Rush might have played in the 80s. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hautzinger
Looking for an unusual evening? How about “beautiful marimba chorales, exciting marimba and drum music, a piece for chopsticks bouncing on whiskey bottles and grill grates” and “one of the early masterpieces” for percussion in an old electrical station? This is how David Skidmore described Third Coast Percussion’s CMA concert at Transformer Station on January 19.
Skidmore, along with Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and Sean Connors makes up Third Coast. Many groups would be daunted by playing in an alternative space such as Transformer Station, but not Third Coast, who have performed at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium and in Frank Lloyd Wright-designed houses across the country, among other unique venues.
“We really like trying new things, playing new places, and finding cool connections that our music has with other disciplines,” Skidmore said in a phone conversation. Hence the quartet’s collaboration with engineers at the University of Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, where Third Coast is Ensemble-in-Residence. “There’s a common misconception that scientists are analytical and musicians or artists are creative. Both of those things are true. But it’s equally true that musicians are very analytical. [Read more…]