Biography
Tim Daisy is a Chicago-based drummer and composer who has been a central figure in the city’s improvised music community for over two decades. A musician who approaches the drums with a composer’s intelligence — understanding rhythm not as the organization of time but as a primary expressive medium — Daisy has built an extensive discography documenting an approach that places percussion at the center of free jazz ensemble thinking rather than in a supporting role.
Daisy founded Relay Recordings in 2011 to document his own work on his own terms — a label that releases only music he performs on or produces, maintaining a tight curatorial focus that has given the catalog an unusual coherence. The label has evolved from a CD-focused operation into an active Bandcamp presence, releasing live documents, studio recordings, and experimental pieces with a directness and speed that mirrors Daisy’s approach to music-making itself: no intermediaries, no delays, no compromise.
His most sustained collaborative relationships within the Catalytic Sound cooperative are with Ken Vandermark, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and Elisabeth Harnik — musicians with whom he has developed the kind of deep mutual attunement that distinguishes long-term collaborative partnerships from mere professional associations. The Earscratcher quartet, documented on Aerophonic Records, brings these relationships into a single ensemble that represents some of the most fully realized music in the Chicago free jazz tradition.
Beyond his collaborative work, Daisy maintains an active solo practice in percussion and composition — writing structured improvisational frameworks for his own ensembles, including Steel Bridge Trio and Vox 4, that reflect a compositional sensibility rooted in the tradition of AACM-era Chicago music: pieces with clear formal structures that create space for genuine creative freedom within defined parameters.
His organizational contribution to the Chicago scene — sustaining a label, maintaining collaborative networks, and continuing to document music that would otherwise go unrecorded — is as significant as his musical contributions. Relay Recordings is a model of what artist-run infrastructure looks like when it is operated with genuine discipline and genuine generosity.
