Downtown Detroit's jazz season kicks off a day early this year with a $25 ticketed evening inside a glass-ceilinged conservatory at the Shinola Hotel, featuring a mother-and-son pairing that captures the deep family roots running through the city's jazz scene. The Birdy Sessions will bring bassist Marion Hayden and her son, drummer and composer Tariq Gardner, together on the same bill on September 3, along with vocalist Kathy Kosins and pianist Michael Malis, in what organizers are billing as the unofficial start to Detroit Jazz Festival weekend.
According to The Michigan Chronicle, doors open at 6:30 p.m. with the performance beginning at 7 p.m. and running until 9 p.m., including a brief intermission. The event uses a strolling format that lets guests move between the Birdy Room and its outdoor terrace, with limited lounge seating available and drinks purchasable from the private Birdy Room bar. The venue itself, tucked inside the Shinola Hotel at 1400 Woodward Avenue, is a conservatory-style space known for its vaulted glass ceilings and wrap-around terrace, according to the Shinola Hotel.
A Family Connection Takes Center Stage
The pairing of Hayden and Gardner carries extra weight this year. Hayden was named the 2025 Kresge Eminent Artist, metro Detroit's highest arts honor, becoming, at 68, both the youngest recipient and the first female jazz musician to win the $100,000 lifetime achievement award, per PBS. Her son Tariq Gardner leads the Afro-futuristic jazz ensemble Evening Star, which won NPR station WDET's Sounds Like Detroit contest in 2025, according to Evening Star's own account of the group's recent recognition.
Rounding out the bill are two other well-known figures in Detroit music. Kathy Kosins, a Detroit-born vocalist and six-time ASCAP award-winning songwriter, got her start backing 1980s pop-soul act Was (Not Was) before moving into jazz, and her live shows often include on-stage abstract painting as part of the performance, per The Velvet Note. Pianist and composer Michael Malis, a University of Michigan doctoral candidate who has released 13 albums, founded the Detroit concert series Other Tones to support composer-performers from underrepresented groups, according to the Saugatuck Center for the Arts.
A Ticketed Prelude to a Free Festival
The contrast between this $25 kickoff and the festival it precedes is notable. Founded in 1980, the Detroit Jazz Festival is the world's largest free jazz festival, sustained through donations, corporate sponsorships, and a $15 million endowment established by the late Carhartt heiress Gretchen Valade, according to DownBeat. That free-admission mandate is what allows the main festival, running September 4 through 7 across consolidated stages at Hart Plaza and Wayne State University's Gretchen C. Valade Jazz Center, to draw the crowds it does without charging at the gate.
Those crowds are enormous. The Detroit Jazz Festival draws more than 300,000 in-person attendees to downtown Detroit each Labor Day weekend and pulled in a global livestream audience of 1.5 million viewers across 43 countries in 2025, per the Detroit Jazz Festival. Grammy Award-winning saxophonist Joe Lovano was named the 2026 Artist-in-Residence and is scheduled to headline multiple sets over the weekend, a lineup Hoodline first detailed in its stacked Labor Day lineup report following the festival foundation's livestream preview event in March.
What to Expect at the Birdy Room
For those attending the smaller Birdy Sessions show, the setup favors intimacy over scale. Guests can purchase cocktails, beer, wine, and other drinks throughout the strolling evening, moving freely between the indoor conservatory space and its terrace as the featured musicians perform. It is a markedly different atmosphere than the outdoor stages awaiting festivalgoers just a day later, but organizers are positioning it as the natural entry point into the weekend's much larger celebration of Detroit jazz.
