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 (Division 81 Records), 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, Sunnyside Records) featuring Bill Frisell, was named among the year’s best by DownBeat.
Born in Northampton, Massachusetts and raised in Bozeman, Montana, Dayhuff began on fiddle before switching to bass in public school. She studied at the Oberlin Conservatory and went on to spend seven formative years in Chicago, where she became a regular on the scene beginning around 2011 while also working as a recording engineer for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Mentored by Robert Irving III and Vincent Davis, she developed lasting musical relationships with artists including Kahil El’Zabar, Corey Wilkes, and Isaiah Collier. In 2016, she moved to New York and studied with Ron Carter and Gerald Cannon while touring with saxophonist Victor Goines and participating in international programs including Horns for Havana.
She was selected for the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance Class of 2020 and earned a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Now based in Los Angeles, she serves as Assistant Professor of Jazz Studies at Loyola Marymount University in LA.