The COVID-19 pandemic has put tens of millions of Americans out of work, but even considering that bleak landscape, musicians have been hit especially hard—most of their jobs only barely exist now, and the infrastructure that might allow them to return someday is in danger of collapsing. Festivals have been canceled, larger concert halls closed, and smaller clubs either shuttered or restricted to fractions of their usual audiences. At least in the States, no one is touring. In Chicago, many of the venues that stage jazz and improvised music have either been streaming pay-what-you-will concerts or sitting dark since March. The disappearance of in-person performance opportunities hurts worse in this context, since the music thrives upon—and in fact usually requires—real-time interaction between players.
Daisy didn’t wait to launch his own projects, though, and in 2003 he made Relay Signals, his first album as a bandleader. In 2011, determined to have an outlet that would let him put out records promptly—as opposed to the European labels he’d been depending on, which often took more than a year—he founded his own label, Relay Recordings.
Daisy released the last of those records, Sereno, in January 2020, and considers that line of musical inquiry closed (at least for now). He was looking forward to rededicating himself to ensemble ventures: In July, he planned to reconvene his chamber ensemble, Vox 4, for a concert and recording. In September, he was going to revive Trio Red Space, with saxophonist Mars Williams and trombonist Jeb Bishop. And in October, he intended to record a series of duets with locals (including Piet) and out-of-towners. “I did have one tour on the books that I was really looking forward to, with the great Austrian pianist Elisabeth Harnik,” Daisy says. “She put a band together with myself, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and Dave Rempis, and we had planned to do a tour of Europe for her 50th birthday celebration in May. Of course, that didn’t happen.”
He reached out to New York-based electronic musician Ikue Mori, who’d played a 2017 trio concert at the Hungry Brain with him and fellow drummer Phil Sudderberg. Mori, who drummed for no-wave trio DNA four decades ago, has become a master improviser on the laptop, using it to marshal sounds into dreamlike sequences of color and event. Daisy is no stranger to working with electronic musicians who sample and tweak his acoustic output, but he’d always done so in real-time exchanges. This time, he submitted to virtual collaboration. “It’s a selection of solo material on drum set, turntables, radios, marimba—everything that I’ve been using up to this point,” Daisy says. “I sent her a total of 12 or 13 files, and I said, ‘You reimagine the material.’”
Daisy is still pondering where this project might point him next. “Usually, after I finish a project, I put it down and I’m thinking about my next move,” he says. “I can’t think of anything yet. I know it’s going to come to me, but right now, I have to sit for a while before I decide what’s next.”
By 2016, Piet was clicking not only with his peers (including saxophonist Jake Wark and drummer Bill Harris, who play with him in Four Letter Words) but also with improvisers ten years his senior. The night after the 2016 presidential election, he played a concert with two of those older musicians, Dave Rempis and Daisy. “We all sort of came in and aired our grievances about what we had just found out, and then after that we just played,” Piet says. “It was very good.”
