Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) has quickly become one of the most distinctive composers in America and one of the most influential women in electronic music. Jlin’s thrilling, emotional, and multidimensional compositions have earned her praise as “one of the most forward-thinking contemporary composers in any genre” (Pitchfork). She has received a 2023 US Artist award and a 2023 Pulitzer Prize nomination. Her mini-album Perspective was released to critical acclaim on the Planet Mu label in 2023, and her much-lauded albums Dark Energy and Black Origami appeared on “best of” lists in The New York Times, The Wire, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and Vogue.
Jlin has been commissioned by Kronos Quartet, Third Coast Percussion, Pathos Quartet, choreographers Wayne McGregor and Kyle Abraham, fashion designer Rick Owens, and visual artists Nick Cave and Kevin Beasley. Her latest release, Akoma, features collaborations with Philip Glass, Björk, and Kronos Quartet.
Third Coast Percussion (TCP) has worked with Jlin on multiple projects since 2019, including the seven-movement suite Perspective, which was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Their collaborative process involves Jlin composing an entire work electronically, sometimes using samples of TCP’s instruments, which is then given to the members of TCP to reimagine through their own lens for live performance on percussion instruments.
For TCP’s 20th anniversary, the quartet asked Jlin to add another layer to the musical chain by creating a new work that is a remix or reimagining of music by another composer who inspires her.
I’m always so delighted when I get to collaborate with Third Coast Percussion. When they asked me to compose a piece that was J. S. Bach–based, I of course jumped right to it. The Bach piece I chose to derive from is the “Kyrie eleison” from his 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 is no different.
—Jlin
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 and ensembles around the world. In June 2024, she concluded a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence.
A founding member of the 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, Sphinx Medal of Excellence and Sphinx Virtuosi Composer-in-Residence, ASCAP Foundation’s Leonard Bernstein Award, and Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year. She serves on the composition and music technology faculty at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.
Lady Justice / Black Justice, The Song is inspired by the artwork of Ori G. Carino—a reflection on his painting Black Justice (2020–2022), 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 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 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.
—Jessie Montgomery
Armenian-born, Los Angeles–raised pianist and composer Tigran Hamasyan is one of the 21st century’s true slipstream musicians. His work crosses boundaries between jazz, crossover classical, electronic, Baroque dance, vocal, and Armenian folk musics atop electronic backdrops and hip-hop beats. Hamasyan was born in 1987 in Gyumri, Armenia. He began playing the family’s piano at age three and was enrolled in music school by six. His early jazz tastes were informed by Miles Davis’s fusion period. Around the age of 10, his family moved to Yerevan, where he came to discover the classic jazz songbook under the aegis of his teacher Vahagn Hayrapetyan. Hamasyan found himself participating in the festivities of the Yerevan Second International Jazz Festival in 2000; when he was 16, his family immigrated to Los Angeles. He stayed in high school for two months before transferring his studies to the University of Southern California, which he attended for two years. As a teen, he won a number of prestigious contests, including the 2003 Montreux Jazz Festival and grand prize at the 2006 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition.
While he has built a career as a performer, Hamasyan’s music has started to become available to other performers, 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 contemporary percussion ensembles, as his creative voice employs extremely complex rhythmic cycles. Within this rhythmic landscape exists a compelling counterpoint of voices supporting or pushing against one another. Hamasyan’s power as a composer is that the individual musical lines are always melodies in their own right, transcending the mathematics of their complex rhythmic skeletons.
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-like motion, 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—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 Third Coast Percussion, who worked to fit together the rhythmic jigsaw puzzle in a way that grooves and allows the character of the musical lines to shine through.
The preeminent classical tabla virtuoso of his time, Zakir Hussain 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 performances, 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, Hussain’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, Hussain 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 performed in India, Europe, and the US. Hussain was the recipient of countless honors, including Padma Vibhushan, Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, 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 Readers Poll over several years, Hussain was honored in 2018 with the Antônio Carlos Jobim Award at the Montreal Jazz Festival. He 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.” He became the first musician from India to receive three Grammys in one year (2024): Best Global Music Album, Best Global Music Performance, and Best Contemporary Instrumental Album.
As an educator, he conducted many workshops and lectures each year, was in residence at Princeton and Stanford universities, and, in 2015, was appointed Regents Lecturer at UC Berkeley. His yearly workshop in the San Francisco Bay Area, which was conducted for 30 years, became a widely anticipated event for performers and serious students of tabla. He was founder and president of Moment Records, an independent record label that presents rare live concert recordings of Indian classical music and world music. Hussain was resident artistic director at SFJAZZ (2013–2016), and was honored with SFJAZZ’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, in recognition of his “unparalleled contribution to the world of music.”
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 and explorations of the special bond between “fellow rhythmists.” This work echoes with memories of his own personal history and the path along which he grew into one of the world’s most revered musicians.
His musical journey started from the time he was a small child, with his father and guru, the famous tabla player Alla Rakha, singing rhythms for the young Zakir 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 or 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 visualized 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 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 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 (TCP) as he developed Murmurs In Time in workshops and rehearsals throughout the course of 2024, and the five recorded this new work together last October. 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 Hussain’s most prominent students, will join TCP for performances in 2025 and beyond.