Detroit jazz bassist, educator Marion Hayden named 2025 Kresge Eminent Artist

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30-01-2025

When jazz musician and educator Marion Hayden treated herself to a sushi lunch on a random day in December, she was definitely not expecting a life-changing phone call.
Today, Kresge Arts in Detroit announced Hayden as the recipient of its 2025 Kresge Eminent Artist prize – and the no-strings-attached $100,000 gift that comes with it – and she's still stunned by the news.
'It was maybe the second week in December,' Hayden recalled, 'and I was entirely unprepared for it. Had no idea that was going to be what we were talking about. I've done things for Kresge in the past – performances. I'm a (2016) Kresge Artist Fellow, so I'm a part of the Kresge Arts in Detroit family; they call on me if there's something I can do to be of assistance, so this call did not seem out of the ordinary for me. I was at my sushi place, Noble Fish in Clawson, and the phone rang.
'Then Katie McGowan said, 'Are you sitting down?''
Award-winning jazz bassist, educator and mentor Hayden, at age 68, is today the youngest recipient of Detroit's highest arts honor and the 17th Detroiter to be anointed for contributions to the region's cultural communities. She is also the second recipient previously to have been named a Kresge Artist Fellow.
Along with the monetary prize, Hayden's life and career will be the subject of a short film and a monograph scheduled for release later this year.
'I credit Detroit and its artists and its wonderful creative culture for so much of who I am,' she said. 'We have such a strong community. It's still my muse.'
Kresge President Rip Rapson paid tribute to Hayden in a media release.
'Marion Hayden is the third jazz musician and the first of her generation to receive this award,' he said. 'Like Wendell Harrison and the late Marcus Belgrave before her, she upholds and extends a rich Detroit legacy as an artist and generously passes on to younger musicians what has been passed on to her. And, like all our Kresge Eminent Artists, she exemplifies how the arts ground and build a community, manifesting the powers of creativity to connect us.'
In addition to Belgrave and Harrison, other previous recipients have been opera impresario David DiChiera and harpist Patricia Terry-Ross; authors Bill Harris, Naomi Long Madgett, Gloria House and Melba Joyce Boyd; photographers Leni Sinclair and Bill Rauhasuer; and visual artists Charles McGee, Ruth Adler Schnee, Marie Woo, Shirley Woodson, Olayami Dabls and Nora Chapa Mendoza.
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A 'first-call' bassist in the jazz world and an artistic pioneer, Hayden is co-founder of Straight Ahead, a groundbreaking Detroit-based ensemble that made headlines in the late 1980s as the first all-female jazz group signed to Atlantic Records, and one of the first and few all-women jazz groups to record and release music since the International Sweethearts of Rhythm in the 1940s' big band era.
The Grammy-nominated ensemble continues its work today, remaining a favorite on the jazz festival circuit and widely hailed as a precursor to a new wave of female performers across the genre.
Along with her full performance schedule, Hayden also continues dual teaching posts. At her alma mater, the University of Michigan, she leads as the Geri Allen Collegiate Lecturer in the Department of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation and also teaches at Oakland University.
Hayden traces the spark to her family's home on Fullerton Street in Detroit's historic Russell Woods neighborhood. The Haydens not only insisted that their two children, daughter Marion and son Herbert, be named after them but also immersed them in their favorite hobbies, traditions and values. That meant a healthy respect for education and a constant celebration of culture. Music played throughout the family's home.
Hayden's father worked for Detroit's parks and recreation department and was a passionate record collector, primarily of jazz. Her first attempt to respond to what she heard began at home, at the piano. Both parents played. Her mom, a high school chemistry teacher, mainly played classical music, while her dad preferred 'jazzy blues.' But Hayden decided piano was not for her.
'I started with the cello,' she said, 'which is pretty related to the bass. I was nine. I actually wanted to play bass then, but they didn't have small basses, so I had to wait till I was tall enough to play string bass, and that was about age 12. I switched over then, and I was really happy. My parents got me a bass of my own so that I could really practice it at home. I'd been trying, really, to play jazz on my cello, but it didn't work as well as I thought. When I started playing jazz on the bass, it really came together.
'I just loved the way the instrument looked. That was the first appeal to me. And when I first got my hands on a cello, and I heard the low notes, they really spoke to me in a very, very profound way – the depth of the instrument. It's a wooden instrument, and you have to get up really close to that instrument to make a sound out of it, and you can feel it vibrate against you. I love the sound. When I got my hands on the bass, I knew I was really in love. That was it.'
By age 15, she was excitedly leaning in. She was an avid listener and a committed student. Hayden, who'd first learned by ear, started studying with a who's-who list of jazz veterans and legends, including Kresge Eminent Artist-to-be Marcus Belgrave. Their paths crossed first at Cass Tech High School, where Hayden was a student, and Belgrave was the artist-in-residence. She later transferred to and graduated from Henry Ford High School.
Ironically, when Hayden enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1973, music was not her focus. Instead, she chose a concentration in journalism with a minor in entomology. As much as her late parents had ignited her love of music, they had different ideas about her choosing the arts as a career.
'They felt it was not steady,'' she recalled, quickly adding, 'and they were 100 percent right.'
Hayden's educational compromise never stopped the music. Although she pursued graduate studies in natural sciences — a year at U-M and two years at Michigan State University — and landed a job with the Michigan Department of Agriculture inspecting landscape plants for pests and diseases for a decade, Marion played on.
She made a name for herself as a go-to accompanist for such Detroit jazz masters as the late Donald Walden, Kenn Cox, and legendary percussionist Roy Brooks. Her time under such greats is one of the reasons a litany of living jazz artists, local and national, have also made Hayden a collaborator. Among them are DeeDee Bridgewater, Kirk Lightsey, Steve Turre, Jon Faddis, Kamau Kenyatta, James Carter, Kareem Riggins, Terri Lyne Carrington, Ingrid Jensen, Nicolas Payton, Alvin Waddles, Charlie Gabriel of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Cindy Blackmon Santana and Gregory Porter.
'I would say I had three major influences on bass,' Hayden said. 'One of my early mentors was a man named Will Austin. Will was a fantastic bass player, one of my first instructors here in Detroit, and he was highly skilled and formidable on the bass. I was later able to put him in my string bass ensemble. I have an ensemble of four or five basses that I'm able to perform with on occasion, and Will was part of that, though he passed during the pandemic. Ron Carter was huge, someone who was highly influential for me. And also a man named Buster Williams.
'I should also mention the great drummer Roy Brooks. Roy was very influential in my understanding of what creativity is. They really showed me a kind of template for what brought creativity into your personal practice, what it was like to be broadly creative and a way that can endure your entire life as a musician.'
It is, then, unsurprising that educating and mentoring and enabling the next generations of jazz musicians has been such an important part of Hayden's life.
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'Mentoring, in my opinion, is what really keeps the music – jazz music, in particular – alive,' she told the Free Press. 'One thing that I love about jazz is that you cannot just get it off of a piece of paper. You can't just read the music and then make the music; you have to listen to the music. You have to hear how people actually play it, and then, you have to actually have somebody explain it to you. I think having that one-to-one relationship with people is really, really important.
'When you speak to a person who is your mentor, they're not going to talk to you in some sterile way about notes and things of that nature. They're going to give you some sense of the history and the legacy of the music at the same time. It becomes so much more meaningful, and at that point, it's not just some sort of exercise. They're giving you the tools so that you can tell your story, although you start off trying to understand the stories of others. Ultimately, you have to internalize those tools and use them to tell your story.'
The majority of Hayden's vast library of original compositions remains unrecorded; the artist will put funds from her cash prize toward finally recording and documenting those pieces. She will also bolster a project in which she repairs and upgrades basses to return to Detroit's music education community, putting more basses directly into the hands of interested students.
Vincent Chandler is a Detroit-based jazz trombonist and bandleader who serves as assistant professor of jazz studies at Wayne State University. Also a 2020 Kresge Artist Fellow, he served on the panel that helped select Hayden as this year's Eminent Artist.
'I arrived on the (Detroit) jazz scene in the late 1980s,' said Chandler. 'I probably started appearing around 1987. And Marion Hayden was already fully on the scene; she was performing with the who's-who of the Detroit jazz community, as well as leading her own bands. She was a little younger than some of the musicians that we now know as Detroit legends, who were performing at various venues and the jazz festival. But Marion, right out of the gate, was welcomed on the stage with them. She was younger, but very mature as a musician.
'The first time I ever saw her play was with Donald Walden. He had a loft called the New World Stage in Harmony Park, and sometimes they'd put on performances outside. I saw Marion play with him, and I'll never forget – she had sunglasses on, and I thought she was the coolest thing on the stage.
'I was always very impressed with that, because jazz has always been a very male-dominated art form, and I'll say, it takes a unique type of strength, perseverance to be a female jazz musician and hold your own. And, of course, now there's a much bigger movement of female jazz musicians on the scene, but Marion is kind of like the beginning of that in recent generations.'
Chandler said he's played countless gigs with Hayden across the last several decades, including Detroit Opera's 2022 'X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.'
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'We played in the pit orchestra for 'X,'' Chandler recalled. 'That was amazing. We were playing in an orchestra but had a dual role: We were playing classical, European orchestral style, and then we also had to play jazz and improvise over some of the most difficult orchestral music I've ever played, written by Anthony Davis. Marion was in the pit with her bass and these great classical musicians, and she was doing her job as a jazz musician for this great opera.'
He praised Hayden for her vision.
'She's been an activist for women in jazz, and I've played with her when she's hired some of the young lions of the jazz community, some of the new upstarts. But I've also witnessed her paying tribute to the legendary musicians of old. And it doesn't stop at musicians – she's just a cultural warrior. She's someone who is a preservationist of not only the music, but the culture. She's an absolute role model, and she's set a fine example for several generations of musicians to come after her.
'There can be stylistic changes in the art world easily; every five years, you get a new flock of musicians who have a new perspective on things. Marion has always been there to lead the way and show us how to do it, what to do, when to do it. She's very important. She's not only thoroughly committed and playing on a high level, but she's an educator of a high level.'
Contact Free Press arts and culture reporter Duante Beddingfield at [e-mail].
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit jazz legend Marion Hayden named 2025 Kresge Eminent Artist