Tim Daisy
  • Tim Daisy

Considering the vitality and depth of Chicago’s jazz and improvised-music scene, I wonder why the city has so few labels devoted to documenting the action. I’m not forgetting Delmark, Southport, and BluJazz, but most of them focus on relatively straight-ahead music—often artists outside that subset of the scene (and within it as well) are forced to take matters into their own hands if they want their music heard by an audience broader than the ones that turn up at gigs. Drummer Tim Daisy started a vanity imprint, Relay Recordings, to do just that, but over the past couple of years he’s turned it into more than just an outlet for music that might otherwise fall by the wayside.