Third Coast Percussion: Try to become the music

As the Big Ears Festival kicks off its second decade, the concert menu for March 21-24 is more than most music lovers can even comprehend, let alone digest, with 40 to 50 separate events each day.

Big Ears turns Knoxville into a glittering metro-sized chandelier, with hundreds of dangling palm-sized diamonds that explode and dazzle from noon to midnight for four days on the first weekend of spring.

Last year, almost two months after the 10th Big Ears ended, the festival’s impact on Knoxville’s cultural sophistication was dramatically demonstrated in the overwhelming response to Yo-Yo Ma’s “Our Common Nature” concert in World’s Fair Park.

The tens of thousands who made such a powerful impression that weekend in late May − they weren’t the people who came from 48 states and two dozen nations outside the USA to attend Big Ears. No, they were the locals who have taken the Big Ears message to heart.

The people who flocked to “Our Common Nature” to see Yo-Yo Ma and Chris Thile, Rhiannon Giddens, Eric Mingus, and Edgar Meyer (Oak Ridge’s biggest gift to the music of this world, who took home two Grammy Awards Feb. 4), they were the people who drink at Yee Haw Brewery and nosh at Potchke. They were the people who sing “Rocky Top” at the top of their lungs whenever they get the chance, the people who think the Sunsphere is way cool and line Gay Street for Knoxville’s Christmas Parade. They were the people whose hearts were broken when a gunman stole lives at the Unitarian Church, and the people who love the Great Smoky Mountains more than anything else in this country. They also love Bristol, baby.

They were the people who lifted Morgan Wallen, Kenny Chesney, Chris Blue, Kelsey Ballerini and Nikki Giovanni into the galaxy swirling over our work-a-day heads.

They were the people who loved watching Pat Summitt lose it at a bad penalty call, and the people who carried a stolen goal post down Cumberland Avenue before dumping it in the river after a miraculous win over Alabama.

Yo-Yo Ma’s “Our Common Nature,” as an extension of Big Ears, established this oddly scruffy town as the epitome of cultural metamorphosis. Every drop of blood, every tragic event, every civic challenge endured by the people of Knoxville was sanctified that night. “Our Common Nature” wasn’t just an NPR-friendly concert idea. It was real. It made our common nature a comforting reality. And its patron saint was Ashley Capps.

In six weeks, Big Ears returns.

Third Coast Percussion

What does this year’s Festival hold in store? Herbie Hancock. Rhiannon Giddens. Jon Baptiste. Edgar Meyer and Christian McBride. Jason Moran. Julian Lage and Joe Henry. Mighty Poplar. The Silk Road Project. King Britt and Blacktronica. The Kronos Quartet. Amythyst Kiah. Cedric Burnside. Caroline Shaw ... have I lost you yet?

Last week, a friend who has never been to Big Ears asked me what I’d go see if I could go to only one show this spring.

“You know, I don’t get it. Why do all these people come from all over the freakin’ world to Knoxville, of all places, to see a bunch of musicians they’ve never heard of? Name one band I could go see who’d make it all make sense to me ... one concert that would explain the Big Ears experience to me.”

I answered without hesitation. Go see Third Coast Percussion. Cause I’ll sure as heck be there. And I wouldn’t miss their joint collaborative gig with the incredible Jlin, aka Jerrilynn Patton, for anything! What? When you spin the music up, that’s when the moves change.

Ok, back up ... How does TCP epitomize Big Ears?

Third Coast is a Chicago phenomenon, just like Footwork. Footwork is a dance world where anyone can free herself or himself at 160 beats per second from anything that tries to hold them down. Third Coast is a quartet of classically trained musicians who threw off their classical restrictions to attain a freedom that is the envy of every professional musician on Planet Earth.

So there’s Big Ears Tenet No. 1: This is about musicians who know no limits. That’s why TCP was the first percussion ensemble to win a Grammy Award. They have no limits.

Grammy Awards are fickle. They recognize (i.e. exist because of) the creative talents of musicians who try to monetize their creativity’s output by selling vinyl records, CDs, MP3 downloads, or simply “listens” on the various social media pipelines that exist now. Oh for the simplicity of The Sixties.

Listen to Third Coast Percussion’s recording of Steve Reich’s “Mallet Quartet: III. Fast,” and you’ll know what I mean, instantly.

You’ll also understand why Steve Reich is a star, whether you have heard his music before or not. Will you be surprised to know this group you’ve never heard of won a Grammy Award in 2017 for a record of Steve Reich compositions?

TCP were nominated for a Grammy again this year, for an amazing record called “Between Breaths,” which included works by TCP themselves, plus commissions by Missy Mazzoli, Tyondai Braxton, Ayanna Woods, and Gemma Peacocke. It was their eighth Grammy nomination, for chamber ensemble performance recordings or for composition.

Have you ever held a Grammy Award in your hands?

Woods’ “Triple Point” and Peacocke’s “Death Watch,” from the “Between Breaths” album, are absolutely transcendent, illuminating, and holy. This album is a documentary of the world emerging from the lockdown traumas of 2020-2022, and it brings up Tenet No. 2.

Big Ears Tenet No. 2: It’s about collaboration. Third Coast Percussion have collaborated with Jlin, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Danny Elfman, Flutronix, Devonté Hynes, Philippe Manoury, Sérgio and Clarice Assad, Arvo Pärt, Augusta Read Thomas, and the one and only Mark Applebaum, to name just a few of their musical friendships. And the products of these collaborations are the fruit of a singular belief in and commitment to human interaction. Take that, COVID-19.

Big Ears Tenet No. 3: Don’t take yourself too seriously. Music is about loving life and having fun whenever, wherever you can. No one embodies that tenet more completely and obviously than Third Coast Percussion.

I had the distinct pleasure of talking to TCP’s founding member Rob Dillon recently. (His cohorts in TCP are Sean Connors, Davis Skidmore, and Peter Martin.) I can distill the dozens of things Rob Dillon said that made me think,“I gotta remember that” to this: he said, “We love finding new ways of taking our sound world and making it part of something greater than just the four of us.”

Do you have a sound world?

Let me know if you can find a ticket and get in to experience Third Coast Percussion. If you can’t, I’ll have a review at the end of March.

Congratulations to Caroline Shaw, a Big Ears veteran and 2024 featured artist, for the Grammy bestowed on Roomful of Teeth’s album “Rough Magic.” Shaw wrote five of the album’s 14 pieces. And congrats to the irrepressible Molly Tuttle, who won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album and gave the industry a lesson in pure joy. At Big Ears, she and her band Golden Highway are going to blow minds.

There’s so much to learn from Big Ears. That’s the bottom line.

John Job is a longtime Oak Ridge resident and frequent contributor to The Oak Ridger.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Third Coast Percussion: Try to become the music