Emma Dayhuff

Emma Dayhuff is a bassist, composer, bandleader, and educator based in Los Angeles, with deep roots in Chicago’s creative music scene. She has performed across the U.S. and internationally with artists including Herbie Hancock, David Murray, Cécile McLorin Salvant, and Patricia Barber. Her debut album, Innovations & Lineage: The Chicago Project (2025), featuring Dee Alexander, Isaiah Collier, and Kahil El’Zabar, established her voice as a composer shaped by Chicago’s experimental lineage. Her forthcoming album Mountains expands that voice, turning her compositions into genre-bending vignettes that form an autobiographical story arc. In traversing her musical landscapes, she brings together musicians from Chicago and Los Angeles, including Corey Wilkes, Isaiah Collier, Jonathan Pinson, Paul Cornish, Andrew Renfroe, and Akenya Seymour.  She is a member of the Esthesis Quartet, whose third album Sound & Fury (2025) featuring Bill Frisell, was named among the year’s best by Downbeat Magazine. Raised in Bozeman, Montana, Dayhuff began on fiddle before switching to bass. She studied at the Oberlin Conservatory, spent seven formative years in Chicago where she also worked as the recording engineer for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and moved to New York in 2016. She was selected for the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance Class of 2020 and now serves as Assistant Professor of Jazz Studies at Loyola Marymount University in LA.