Piqi Miqi, a.k.a. Jared Bailey, at work. Alexandra Chi Photo.
The first time Jared Bailey heard The Neptunes, he was a 12-year-old kid growing up in New Haven, and the sound washed right over him. He grooved to the synthy guitar. He listened for the creeping voiceovers, the guest artists who laid out everything on the track. He savored it when they stepped back and made room for member Pharell Williams, or let their vocals ebb and flow in time with keys and percussion.
He knew, right then and there, that he wanted to be a producer. He just couldn’t have imagined, in the moment, the musical journey it would take him on.
Bailey, a son of New Haven who now lives in Prague, is the musical brain behind Piqi Miqi, the funk-soaked alter ego of “that nerdy guy” who grew up between Newhallville and Edgewood, and now creates music that bends both geographical and sonic boundaries. On Sept. 16, he will return to New Haven as part of Funk Noire, a night of music at Cafe Nine that also includes the artists Indigaux (a.k.a. Dymin Ellis), Tch Lss, and Christline.
Each hails from a different part of the state: Indigaux is from New Haven, Tch Lss is based in Hartford, and Christline in Norwalk. While Bailey still holds fast to his roots in Edgewood, this will be his first formal performance in New Haven; he has lived in the Czech Republic since 2010.
“For a long time, I was scared to go back [to New Haven],” he said in an interview over Google Meet with Ellis, who founded Punq Noire in 2022. “I felt like I had to prove myself. Like, ‘I can’t come back until I’ve made it.’ Then the last time I came back, I was really happy to see what’s happening in the city. They’re making music that I have never heard the style of. It’s very innovative and raw.”
That transformation started for him not on the streets of Prague but in New Haven, growing up between the city’s Newhallville and Edgewood neighborhoods as he hopped from one public school to another. Even from a young age, Bailey was intrigued by music, particularly the piano. At nine or 10, he started taking classical piano lessons with Sheila Getman-Sherwin, an elder in the community who taught out of her home.
Even then, he can remember thinking that he wanted to deepen his practice—to “get into this music” until it felt like a part of him—and not knowing exactly where to start. His dad, the photographer Jonathan Bailey, took him to New York City to look for a keyboard, which the two found in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood. But it wasn’t “what I needed,” Bailey remembered (a treasured Korg Triton keyboard that his dad bought him years later solved that problem, although he couldn’t have predicted it then).
He went back to the musical drawing board, teaching himself about music production programs like FruityLoops, QBase and Pro Tools through books at the city’s public library (“I’m 38, so Google wasn’t even out yet,” he said with a smile). He spent time absorbing music with his cousin, the hip-hop artist and producer Steve “Stezo” Williams, who by then ran a barbershop in West Haven.
At home, he listened to groups like The Neptunes, comprising artist-producer duo Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, and alongside them, everything from N.E.R.D. to old-school hip hop. “I thought, ‘What can I do so I can see the fruits of my labor?’” he asked himself. And music production was the answer.
In 1999, Bailey joined an educational experiment that helped set him on that path. In New Haven, the charter school Amistad Achievement First Academy welcomed its inaugural fifth grade class, with a focus on community building that spoke to him. After years of playing hopscotch between the city’s public schools, “that was kind of what springboarded my whole academic life,” he remembered.
He loved it, from a school day that ran through 5 p.m. to the questions that his teachers and peers asked as they built “our own microsociety.” With a handful of friends, he formed a music group called BK2, an homage to the then-nascent boy band B2K that was also a riff on the name. He doesn’t remember much about it—except that it fed something curious in him that’s still there, all these years later.
Through a visiting teacher, he learned about the Icahn Scholars program at Choate Rosemary Hall, a private prep and boarding school in Wallingford. Something clicked, he remembered: he saw the path to Choate as one through which he could hone his skills in music, grow his academic footprint and spend a semester abroad. He still remembers telling his mom that he wanted to go to boarding school—and then learning that he would attend with two of his closest friends from New Haven.
At Choate, Bailey thrived. Still a wide-eyed teenager coming out of his shell, he began taking music production classes with Timothy Bradley, a keyboard player who had worked with the musicians Jesse Johnson, Prince and Jody Watley before ending up at a prep school in Wallingford. From music production, he began working out of the school’s studio, and then recording the school’s orchestras, quartets, bands and a cappella groups.
“That gave me a lot of free rein,” he remembered. With a few peers, he started recording himself, with a talent for production that never excluded performance. Through the school, he also caught the travel bug, spending a semester in Spain that made him hungry for more time outside of the U.S. When he returned, he applied to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU, where he could fuse his twin loves of music and travel.
“There was all this pressure to get into a prestigious university,” he said, and he was crushed when he didn’t. For a year, Bailey studied music at Western Connecticut State University (WestConn), itself a powerhouse for music education, then transferred into New York University. His acceptance was conditional on taking a semester abroad the fall of his sophomore year, which he’d been itching to do since returning from Spain.
When Bailey chose Prague, it was simply because it was different, this grand, historic city that seemed to have been preserved in amber. But when he went, “I fell in love,” he said. There was something about the city’s streets, about the language, about the music and culture and food he was experiencing that pulled him in with a nearly magnetic force.
By the time he flew back to school, he had a Czech girlfriend and made a promise to himself that he would go back as often as he could.
And he did. When Bailey returned to New York, he criss-crossed the city looking for Czech food, and bars where he could practice his language skills. Over the next two years, he became fluent in Czech and traveled back to the country three times, working modeling gigs and campus jobs to cobble together the money for cheap flights. When he was in the U.S., he buckled down on his studies, majoring in economics with plans to become an investment banker. For a while, “I gave up on my music dreams,” he said. He thought that world was behind him.
But when Bailey dipped his toe into the world of investment banking, “I just felt like, ‘Ah, something’s missing,” he remembered. Then he heard about the concept of a gap year from a peer who was Danish. He contemplated it, and then planned out a year in the Czech Republic and then a return to a nascent career in banking.
That was 2010. When he arrived in Prague, Bailey took odd jobs, working as a modeling agent and doing some acting for television, including on the Czech soap opera Ulice. He returned to music making, first with rap, and then in a funk, synth and pop group called The DAT. In that group, in which he performed under the sobriquet Mickey Price, his bandmate coined the term “Picky Mickey” as a reference to how particular Bailey was “during the production and recording process,” he said.
By then, one year had turned into two, and two into three, and three into 10. When the band broke up around 2015, he took the nickname and transformed it into Piqi Miqi. He’s been reinventing himself as that solo act ever since.
Every time he considered going home, “I was always like, damn, I don’t want to go back there, it’s scary,” he said (he’s spoken openly in both English and Czech about his ambivalent relationship with America, including in this interview). By the time he was ready, it was early 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic had brought travel to a screeching halt.
“Where I live in Prague, I’m one of the only people doing something different here,” he said.
In his videos, a person can see and hear him experimenting with his practice in real time, from synthy, 80s-soaked slow jams with bumping percussion to upbeat funk numbers with full choreography, saturated color and a distorted video lens. In his early recordings, there’s a sense of something decidedly vintage and throwback-y, with growling vocals that deepen and bloom as the track grows from a single, synthy beat to danceable percussion.
Since, Bailey has kept pushing himself as a musician. In “My Room,” for instance, which came out last year, the artist is front and center, constantly moving his body as he croons through a too-small bedroom that is packed with people. With a Ghostbusters-esque hook—there’s a healthy dollop of MJ thrown in too—he lets the scene descend into madness, having as much fun with the scenic direction as he is with his mellifluous ask to give people the funk.
Just when a person thinks they have him figured out, meanwhile, he keeps changing it up. In the song and accompanying video for “Daydreaming,” released earlier this year, he’s wandering barefoot through a meadow, mirrors rising in the tall, dry grass around him as he searches for a beloved, the pining palpable in the honey and pep of his voice. Around him, characters appear and disappear clad in silk, the sun bouncing off of them in a way that feels wholly surreal.
Last year, he at last returned to the Elm City for the first time in over a decade for his mom’s 60th birthday, and remembered how much he had missed it. Since, he’s made it a point to come home every three months. On a recent trip in May, Ellis-as-Indigaux showed him around, introducing him to artists across the city.
“Now we’re doing this together,” he said excitedly. When Bailey takes the stage at Cafe Nine next week, it will mark his first show—that is, not in a middle school classroom—in New Haven. In many ways, both he and Ellis see it as decades of musical dreaming coming to fruition.
“I started Punq Noire because I was interested in our history and how diverse the culture-bearers of our history have been,” Ellis said, pointing to their particular affinity for Little Richard. “Punq Noire has since pivoted to aspiring to be an archive of the local music scene. With Funk Noire at Cafe Nine, I want to honor the fact that music has a lot of legs. It has a lot of branches. It’s like a tree.”
“Black people created every musical genre that is popular right now, and to me changing the tone to funk is honoring that history and that cultural relevance,” they continued. “Jared, this is your first time performing in New Haven, and I’m very honored. I feel very proud to be helping present this and also kind of nervous, excited to see how people respond.”
Punq Noir Presents: Funk Noir takes place at Cafe Nine, 250 State St. in New Haven, on Sept. 16 at 7 p.m. (doors at 6 p.m.). Tickets and more information are available here.