On February 12, 2017, Third Coast Percussion’s highly acclaimed album of Steve Reich percussion works received the 2017 GRAMMY Award for Best Chamber Music / Small Ensemble Performance. The album, simply titled Steve Reich, features the works Mallet Quartet, Sextet, Nagoya Marimbas, and Music for Pieces of Wood. Third Coast Percussion also performed music from the album live at the awards ceremony.
When the recording was released in February 2016 on Cedille Records, it drew widespread praise from music critics across the US and abroad. BBC Music Magazine praised the combination of “creative fearlessness with reverent precision” and The Washington Post wrote, “The ensemble’s rich resonance, combined with the variety of pitches and shifting dynamics, evokes a kaleidoscopic dithyramb of rare power.” The New York Times praised the “relaxed warmth of the Mallet Quartet,” the “glistening brightness of Music for Pieces of Wood,” and the “full-blooded drama in the Sextet, which contains within its five movements a world of expressions from impish charm to almost oppressive darkness.”
Steve Reich has previously won two GRAMMY Awards—the first in 1990 for Different Trains, as recorded by Kronos Quartet on Nonesuch Records, and the second in 1999 for Music for 18 Musicians, also on the Nonesuch label.