Photos: Emma Dayhuff to Release Sophomore Album MOUNTAINS
The album features Isaiah Collier, Corey Wilkes, Paul Cornish and Jonathan Pinson, with the single The River.
Bassist, composer and bandleader Emma Dayhuff is set to release MOUNTAINS, her second album as a leader, via Division 81 Records. The project draws on Dayhuff's childhood in Bozeman, Montana, translating the surrounding mountain landscapes into original compositions, while also reflecting her years immersed in Chicago's creative music scene. The album features Isaiah Collier, Corey Wilkes, Paul Cornish and Jonathan Pinson, and its first single, THE RIVER, explores the tension between structured rhythmic phrasing and looser, more chaotic collective improvisation.
Photo Credit: Nate Dejene
Mountains is available via Division 81 Records on September 4, 2026.
Picture yourself as a dot in a vast mountain range. Early in the morning, you ascend a ridgeline as a thick bank of fog sweeps over the adjacent mountainside, fills the canyon below, and begins to overtake you. As you reach the peak, a second bank of fog rises to meet the first, creating a double updraft on both sides of the ridge, engulfing you in dense, whirling clouds. You feel sublimated, insignificant, and unafraid. A guardian watches over you.
This is what bassist, composer and bandleader Emma Dayhuff conjures in the first minutes of Mountains, her forthcoming second album as a leader. The music charts a path back to her childhood in Bozeman, Montana, where she was raised amid the jaw-dropping vistas that would eventually find their way into her compositions.
The album's first single, 'The River,' introduces the idea through a composition Dayhuff wrote to push the boundaries of collective musical phrasing.
'But like a river is hemmed in by its banks, the rhythmic boundaries are defined,' Dayhuff explains. 'As the water gains momentum, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay within those boundaries without a certain amount of chaos becoming part of the journey.'
Dayhuff started music at nine years old on Irish fiddle, switched to bass in public school and studied at the Oberlin Conservatory before moving to Chicago, where she immersed herself in the city's creative music community. In 2016, she moved to New York to play in clubs each night until 4 a.m. — a life that felt about as far from Bozeman as one could possibly be. One night on the banks of the Hudson River, her worlds collided.
'Looking out over the river, I felt the same sense of kinship with the New York City skyline as I did with the mountain ranges surrounding my childhood home,' she recalls. 'The world suddenly felt smaller, less intimidating.'
Mountains grew from Dayhuff's 2025 debut album, Innovations & Lineage: The Chicago Project, which featured saxophonist Isaiah Collier, vocalist Dee Alexander and percussionist Kahil El'Zabar.
'The first record was an homage to the Chicago style of groove-based avant-garde playing,' she explains. 'This record takes that concept of composition and mixes it with a Los Angeles approach to modern jazz, pulling from R&B, hip-hop, funk, and rock.'
The band itself reflects those two musical worlds, pairing Chicagoans Corey Wilkes and Isaiah Collier with Angelenos Paul Cornish and Jonathan Pinson.
Trumpeter Corey Wilkes was one of the first people Dayhuff met in Chicago. With great fanfare, he walked through the door to a jam session with trumpeter Maurice Brown at the New Apartment Lounge on the South Side at two in the morning.
'They brought this insanely infectious energy — I had never experienced anything like it,' Dayhuff remarks.
She has known Collier for a decade. 'We were both figuring out how to play at the same time, and we found our way to the same mentor in Vincent Davis.'
Dayhuff and Cornish attended the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance together, of which Pinson is also an alum. 'Playing with Paul and Jon is truly the best,' she says. 'They both manage to be definitive and flexible at the same time, and they do it together, which is a rare gift.'
Beginning with 'Capricorn,' Mountains descends from the top of the mountain, following the ways the mind wanders between being present in nature and reflecting on life.
'It always surprises me how loud the most gentle breeze can be in the mountains,' Dayhuff says. 'You hear it from miles away as it funnels through the trees and canyons. At first, the sound is unnerving — like an approaching storm. But it becomes familiar, comforting.'
That landscape is constantly changing. 'Scorched Bark and Wildflowers' was originally called 'Fire,' until Dayhuff realized fire told only part of the story. What stayed with her was the forest's recovery: 'the explosion of flowers and young trees that take over a mountainside alongside the blackened skeletons of former giants.'
Elsewhere, the scenery gives way to relationships and memory. 'Distance' is what Dayhuff calls 'a complex love song,' exploring the physical and emotional longings that accompany mercurial long-distance relationships.
On 'Horsefeathers,' she reaches further back. 'I grew up an only child in an old farmhouse on a dead-end trailhead. The horses were my main companions when I got home from school,' Dayhuff relates.
The song evokes the rhythmic agility of riding horses and the playfulness of childhood — two qualities she also recognizes in the way musicians interact on the bandstand.
The only song on Mountains not written by Dayhuff is 'Jesus Is A Lonely Man,' by bassist and legendary composer Bill Lee. Originally written for Richard Davis and the New York Bass Choir, the piece carries a personal connection for Dayhuff.
'I got to know Richard a little during the last years of his life, and once I learned this song, it stuck with me.'
After the Parliament-inspired 'Valleys Above,' the ruminative 'Skylines' closes the album back on the shores of the Hudson, where the skyscrapers once reminded Dayhuff of the mountains surrounding her childhood home.
'Life is mountains and valleys, you know?' she says. 'These are the moments that define who we are.'
Across Mountains, those moments stretch from Montana to Chicago, New York and Los Angeles; from childhood trails and horses to 2 a.m. jam sessions and the Hudson River. Dayhuff finds connections between places that once seemed impossibly far apart and between the musicians and experiences that shaped her along the way.
With Mountains, she has charted that terrain like never before.
Tracklist
1. Sentinel
2. Capricorn
3. The Wind
4. Scorched Bark & Wildflowers
5. Distance Featuring Akenya Seymour and Andrew Renfroe
6. The River
7. Horsefeathers (Hey Paul)
8. Jesus Is A Lonely Man
9. Valleys Above
10. Skylines
About 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 and is on faculty at the Milt Hinton Institute for Studio Bass and the Richard Davis Young Bassists Foundation.
Dayhuff began her musical training on Irish fiddle at age nine before switching to bass, later studying at the Oberlin Conservatory and relocating to Chicago to develop within its creative music community.
Photo Credit: Nate Dejene
