I have something very exciting to share with you today - Sandbox Percussion’s Tiny Desk Concert!

I have been a fan of these concerts since they began, and so many of my favorite musicians and the folks that I look up to have been featured over the years. All four of us feel very honored to be included in this community.

Sandbox has grown and thrived because of its collaborators – the composers and other artists that we make music with. There were so many pieces and people that we wanted to feature on this concert, but they only gave us 15 minutes (and a very tiny desk)! In the end, we decided to highlight two people who have meant a lot to us, and who we have created many pieces of music with – Andy Akiho and Viet Cuong.

We met Viet in undergraduate school, and have been working with him since the very early days of Sandbox. He’s written many pieces for us, including the sensational Re(new)al - the first percussion quartet concerto that we have ever performed. For this concert, we chose Water, Wine, Brandy, Brine - a gorgeous piece of Viet’s that uses a set of tuned crystal glasses.

Andy Akiho is the creative force behind Seven Pillars - the largest-scale commission we’ve undertaken thus far, and a multi-media production that we are very proud of. We start our concert with Pillar III, a rhythmically charged piece that stretched us to our limits technically when we first learned it. We’re about to embark on a brand new journey with Andy – a percussion quintet featuring Sandbox + Andy himself on the steel pan. I first got to know Andy through his steel pan playing….he is one of those generational talents who redefines the instrument that he plays. Every time he hears us play Seven Pillars, he tells me that the only thing he wishes is that he could be playing with us. So, we’ve commissioned him to write a new evening-length work for all five of us. That piece isn’t ready yet! But, we still wanted to include Andy as a performer in this concert, so we’re playing our arrangement of Karakurenai, a very old piece of Andy’s that we still play all the time.

We had a lot of fun putting this concert together with the folks at NPR, and we hope that you’ll enjoy watching it. Thank you so much for supporting us over the years.

Watch our Tiny Desk Concert here.