by Orange Ficus • March 21, 2026
It’s Saturday, March 21st (sometime between six and six-thirty PM) and Phillip Daniel is jumping out of his seat.
Literally.
If only for a moment of flight; for a fraction of the beat; for the smallest of breaths, Phillip Daniel leaps from the black leather bench below.
All the while, the man whirs like a gyroscope: fingers leap through looping arms in polyrhythmic swayings, piano keys tangle and clunk and unclunk, pedals are mashed, and the stage creaks aplenty. An orbit, of sorts, his body careens and crouches. He leaps, pulls away, rides the shock, only to swing back. Boomerang. Always, on solid Earth, he lands.
And it’s in that return that I believe Phillip Daniel has found a groove. Sun Ra donned silvery metal armors and kaleidoscopic knittings and religiously sought after that interstellar chord. A groove that gazes up to the cosmos.
Phillip Daniel wears a black sweater and black slacks and shortened his second set to watch basketball (his beloved Huskers were tipping off), and he searches for something a little more human. His is a groove that gazes back at Earth.
Even the stage took on the luster of early spring as, saturated in green and yellow spotlights, Alex Massa and Phillip Daniel guided their audience through a veritable feast of instrumentation: drum pads and tambourines and synthesizers and keyboards and melodicas and triangles and trumpets and rain sticks.
This “reverb duo,” as Massa dubbed them, first met on a whim. Story goes that Daniel happened to be in the Black Hills at some point and, without knowing a thing about him, agreed to play a gig with Massa.
The punchline is that Daniel considers himself a composer, a more careful and considered form of musical improviser. Alex Massa, on the other hand, is the founder of 501(c)(3) nonprofit IMPROVISEARTS. When asked before their first gig, “you’re not gonna make me improvise, are you?”, Massa chuckled and promised him. Absolutely, yes.
Massa cut his teeth playing jazz in New Orleans, “allergic to making a plan” (according to Daniel). Daniel is a classical musician who, as of late, specializes in ballet and film scores.
The irony of these two very different backgrounds is that not at all do they clash. Together, this “reverb duo” assembled a highly moving and rhythmically complex setlist, and all the while kept room for play.
At times, they shapeshifted before our very eyes from professional musicians to two bros screwing around in the basement. And, given the stuffy norm of symphonies and operas and concertos and the like, they proved rather poignantly that classical music pairs well with an ice-cold beer (shoutout to HayCamp Brewing Company for hosting).
In the segments of the show dedicated to improvisation, the duo played more like a jazz band. Leaning into looping melodies and “perpetual rhythms,” they took alternating and, sometimes, competing swings at jazzy riffs, expertly playing with tempo, scale, and tone. A dialogue in trumpet and piano, they swung hard back and forth, outpacing each other, shifting keys on each other, cornering each other into wholly new melodies and rhythms.
In a word, play (see what I did there?).
And yet, always returning; finding delight in the happenchance synchronicities, in the accidental harmonies, in the unison, momentarily.
And, unless it was an accident due to my own mishearing, I’m almost certain that Phillip Daniel’s opening song “THIS TOO COULD CHANGE” is written as a fractal. Like river deltas and plant growth, it’s a melody within a melody, played at different tempos and folding from and into itself and, ultimately, returning back to its most gentle genesis in silence.
This all doesn’t mean they didn’t stray into the strange and spacey. Much of the show was strange (in the best way) and, in fact, halfway through the set, Massa and Daniel dipped heavily into the dysphonic.
Here, I then thought at my table, here comes the space music.
And, surely enough, for a brief moment I found myself in church on Mars. And yet, as soon as it arrived, the dysphonic dissipated, “already swallowed in the sea.”
A blessed return.
In this, the age of the billionaire space race, Daniel’s Earthly soundscapes were a breath of fresh air. And, given the look of utter peace on his face as he played “FLOWERS,” the last song of the night, I think he might agree.
This weekend marked Daniel’s fourth performance in Rapid City. It was made possible by Massa’s nonprofit IMPROVISEARTS (started in 2023, it supports all matters of artist development, focusing heavily on Black Hills high school students… for more information, visit improvisearts.org).
This weekend marked Daniel’s fourth performance in Rapid City.
It was made possible by
Alex Massa’s nonprofit IMPROVISEARTS
(started in 2023, it supports all matters of artist development, focusing heavily on Black Hills high school students… for more information,
visit improvisearts.org