New Album: Dr. Emma Dayhuff, Innovations & Lineage: The Chicago Project

Bassist, composer, and educator Dr. Emma Dayhuff will release her long-awaited debut album Innovations & Lineage: The Chicago Project on Friday, August 15, 2025. The record is a culmination of more than fifteen years of deep listening, collaboration, and heartfelt contribution to the rich tradition of Chicago’s Black creative music. It features powerhouse collaborators Dee Alexander, Kahil El’Zabar, and Isaiah Collier bridging four generations of Chicago’s most storied musicians. Each musician plays a vital role in shaping the city’s singularly innovative and versatile artistic community and the continuation of Chicago’s enduring legacy of creative sound.

Dayhuff began attending jam sessions in Chicago in 2011 as a means to express herself after a long musical hiatus. Through her persistence and consistency, Chicago’s musicians took noticed and began to invite her to their homes to work on music. They explored concepts on how to use rhythm and harmony to manipulate energy, movement, and emotion. “Chicago, the city and its artists, taught me the culture behind the notes—one of integrity, fellowship, and daring,” Dayhuff reflects.

In 2016, Dayhuff moved to New York City in pursuit of a musical intensity she thought New York held the secret to. She delved into bebop language, learned to tip, met passionate and exceptional artists across the globe, and leaned into the hustle and grind of the city. One night, a young Isaiah Collier showed up at Small’s Jazz Club and the two played together. She immediately took note of the ideas she hadn’t played in years flowing out of her bass—polyrhythms, pedal points, growls, and rolls. “I felt free. I felt grounded,” she muses, “I felt my voice feel the room. Isaiah and I were speaking the same language learned from our mutual mentors. It was a language from Chicago.”

After that serendipitous meeting, Dayhuff became obsessively curious about the musical instincts she had absorbed during her formative years in Chicago. That curiosity led her into a deep dive, researching the history of Chicago’s South Side artists and organizations.  For the past century, Chicago’s south side has ridden a roller coaster of boom-and-bust cycles of creative productivity. Dayhuff started to see connections between her mentors (Vincent Davis, Kahil El’Zabar, Baabe Irving III, Junius Paul, Dee Alexander, Herbie Hancock) and the innovators of the Black Arts Movement (Roscoe Mitchell, Malachi Favors, Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Ramsey Lewis) and the BAM legends who frequented the entertainment district along Garfield Ave in the 1950s—Gene Ammons, Eddie Harris, Von Freeman, and Ahmad Jamal – and so on.

“Musical energy, phrasing, language, and concept have been passed from generation to generation and made unique by each individual who devoted their life to their craft: Chicago’s own griot tradition,” explains Dayhuff.

“My artistic voice owes its fruition to this incredibly resilient legacy of experimental music and art. Innovations & Lineage pays tribute to that legacy: Chicago’s grit, generosity, and griots.”

A dynamic bassist and composer with a performance career spanning over two decades, Dayhuff has worked with jazz luminaries including Herbie Hancock, David Murray, Patricia Barber, and Cecile McLorin Salvant. She has performed at the Newport Jazz Festival, Chicago Jazz Festival, Montreux Jazz Festival, Umbria and Sant’Anna Jazz Festivals in Italy, and New York’s Winter Jazz Fest. Currently an Assistant Professor of Jazz Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, she holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Her teaching philosophy was cultivated under the guidance of bass masters Ron Carter, Gerald Cannon, and Peter Dominguez, emphasizing a holistic approach that focuses on technical proficiency, cultural understanding, musicality, and creativity. Emma empowers students to develop their unique artistic voices in the context of their deepest musical influences. She has taught across North America, Australia, and Europe and is on faculty at the Milt Hinton Institute for Studio Bass and the Richard Davis Young Bassists Foundation.

Visit online at emmadayhuff.com/