- Welcome to "American Black Journal."

I'm your host, Stephen Henderson.

My first guest was just named, this year's Kresge eminent artist, award-winning jazz bassist, composer, and educator, Marion Hayden is the recipient of what's considered Metro Detroit's highest arts honor.

Her award includes a hundred thousand dollars from the Kresge Foundation.

I am pleased to welcome my friend Marion Hayden back to "American Black Journal."

It is great to have you here as always.

And congratulations.

- Thank you, Stephen, and thank you so much for having me here at "American Black Journal."

I'm so excited to be here.

- Yeah.

So in the intro I said, this is considered our area's greatest arts honor.

Is that how you feel?

- I totally feel that way.

It's like getting a big giant hug from my community that I love.

I just love this community.

It's my passion.

It's my muse.

I carry the banner of Detroit wherever I go, so.

- Yeah.

- Yes, it feels great.

- Yeah, so I wanna talk about, what brought you to this point, but also pause a second to acknowledge that this is an award that recognizes everything that you've done, the span of your career.

So let's talk about that career and kind of how you got into music into the bass, which I think I've told you before, I was a tuba player in college.

I have a double bass at home and plunk around on it.

It is one of my favorite instruments.

So talk about how you got to this point.

- Well, I have to say, one of the wonderful things about growing up in Detroit, well, first of all, I should give complete credit to my parents.

My parents, Marion Ford, Hayden Thomas, she ended up getting remarried after my father passed, and Herbert E. Hayden.

And our little house that we grew up in, and the wonderful neighborhood of Russell Woods on Fullerton Street.

And they were just wonderful parents.

They never put any restrictions on me as a young woman, as a girl, as to what girls could do.

My mother was a chemist, so she knew no boundaries of that sort.

So, well, I just started taking cello lessons when I was about nine in our great Detroit public school, music education programs who I also loved.

Oh, public school music programs are so important and I'm always on my little bandwagon.

I'm always standing on my soapbox about continuing to support them for the young people that are in school now.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- And so I was a little girl taking lessons in my school, took Coachella lessons at nine, and then when I got tall enough to stand up to the bass, 'cause I've always wanted to play bass, I was about 12, I switched over to bass and I had a lot of jazz in my household, care of my dad who was a huge jazz fan and record collector and kind of a closeted jazz pianist.

He was really good.

And he exposed me to such great music.

And then he made what I considered to be just such a wonderful gesture for me.

He took me to a summertime jazz camp, called Metro Arts, which was right here on Selden Street in Detroit.

And that's where I met the likes of Wendell Harrison, Marcus Belgrave, Harold McKinney, and so many of the great jazz musicians who'd become so influential for me and others.

- Yeah.

- And these were the torch bearers, the people that were really keeping the music alive at that time, which would have been the, you know, early 70s, you know, and that's how I caught the jazz bug.

- Yeah.

- And from then on, at some point you hear something and you just know this is something that you have to hear in your ears forever.

And that was what it was for me.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

So I always think of music as a form of expression, and that expression is really important to the artist who is making that expression.

In a little bit, we're gonna listen to something that you're playing for us and our viewers.

Talk about that expression, the things that you're saying and trying to communicate when you're playing.

- Well, one thing about, especially certainly at this point in my career is, I have a pretty big mental library of things.

There's a lot of music that I've played and a lot of different genres.

I've played the music of Argentinian tango.

I played music from, you know, Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico and Cuban.

I have played folk music, some classical music of pretty much all types of jazz and all the different spheres that we work in.

And so I'm a collector of themes and a collector of musical moments.

And so when I play, especially something like a solo piece, then basically I try to weave those moments together and threads so that they can be interesting.

I've tried to find things that are interesting from my mental collection.

And it's very important, I think, especially for a bass player, that we have a lot of experience because the bass is a very ubiquitous instrument, - Yes.

- In all ensembles.

- So much more versatile than anybody ever thinks it is.

- It is.

It's the basis of so many different places.

And so I have an opportunity to really be very broadly expressive in so many different ways.

I mean, as I say, you know, rock, indie rock, all kinds of things.

Gospel of course, you know, all the branches of black music.

- Yeah.

- And so I try to bring all those things to bear when I perform and just try to be broadly expressive, really talk about the music that I'm playing in a way that is befitting of any particular thing I'm doing.

- Yeah.

So, you know, in that way you're as much a creator.

I know you don't like to call yourself a composer.

- No.

- But you're a creator in the sense of taking all of these things, all of these ideas, all these little bits of things that you've heard or played around with and putting 'em together.

- Very much so.

And I really love doing that.

One of the things that I enjoy doing a lot of is this idea of composing from a narrative point of view.

And so many times when I'm composing, I'm composing from an actual story.

It might be a story that I'm trying to tell.

I'll give an example.

One of the pieces that I wrote, this was a commissioned piece from our ex-Detroit, was about the city of Highland Park.

That's where my husband and I had lived, my husband Fell Gardner and our two young men Tarique Gardner and as Asakele Gardner, we raised our family there.

And Highland Park has an amazing history in the auto industry.

- Yeah.

Yes.

- And so I created a whole piece about Highland Park's history, and it included also interviews from Highland Parkers where they talked about the history of their town and how things had changed, - Yeah.

- Over the years.

- Yeah, right?

- And I have to say, I really loved delving into that.

And I took from that so many different ways of talking about the city and also ways to be able to kind of lay their beautiful narratives, you know, in a beautiful bed of musical flowers, you know?

- Yeah.

You have some performances coming up where people can actually come see you live.

Talk about this.

- I do.

I would love to have people come and please come out and see my band Marion Hidden Legacy at the Blue Llama Jazz Club in Ann Arbor.

I'll be there on April the fourth, and then I will be with my great band Straight Ahead that I'm a co-founder of, that band of wonderful women that's been together for many years.

Grammy nominated band.

- Not just random women.

I mean, these are women who are just stars, absolute stars.

- In their own right, each of them.

And we actually were the first all women group signed to a major jazz label.

- Yeah.

Right, right.

- So we will be at the Freight House series that's sponsored by University Musical Society in Ypsilanti on April the 13th.

And then we'll also be at the Cranbrook Project, Friday Night Live series on June the 13th.

So come on out and see us, everyone.

Love to have you there.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

And again, you'll be doing all of the things that the Kresge eminent artist does during the next year.

- I am.

It's just been so beautiful and I so appreciate Kresge for this opportunity to, as I said, just be overwhelmed with gratitude.

- Yeah.

- I'm just overwhelmed.

- Yeah.

Well Mary, congratulations again.

Thanks for being here on "American Black Journal."

- Thank you, Stephen.