Before Grant Kwiecinski was headlining festivals with his saxophone-centric electronic-music project, GRiZ, he was just a kid in the Detroit suburbs learning to play the instrument that would become his signature.
“I started playing sax in elementary school, because my school had funding from the state to provide us that education,” says Kwiecinski. “But not everyone gets that opportunity.”
Since 2014, Kwiecinski has helped raise over $400,000 to correct that, by providing more music education to Detroit kids with his annual 12 Days of GRiZMAS holiday event. The mini-festival — which ran Dec. 1-12 and raised $100,000 in 2021 — spans the city with musical performances, yoga, crafting, caroling, roller-skating and more, with profits from ticket and merchandise sales going to Seven Mile, a Detroit-based organization that provides music, art and coding lessons for kids in underserved local communities.
“We ended up working with Seven Mile music because their founder was living in [Detroit neighborhood] Brightmoor for three years and giving music lessons himself,” says Kwiecinski. “He was working in the community, working with community leaders and going door to door giving piano lessons. Seven Mile did the work to understand what the community needed. That’s exactly the kind of energy we want to align with.”
The GRiZMAS hub is a 900-square-foot retail space in downtown Detroit that’s made available through an annual donation by commercial real estate firm Bedrock Detroit. There, Kwiecinski and his core collaborators Jared Berman and Harrison Diskin — Kwiecinski’s friends since childhood — and former co-manager Kathryn Griffin transform the empty storefront into a winter wonderland, selling a swath of GRiZMAS merch from coffee to clothing. This year, the store averaged $15,000 in sales per day. The space also welcomes the volunteer community that supports the event. “I met a woman who drove eight hours from Kentucky just to participate,” says Kwiecinski.
That community expanded in 2020, when GRiZMAS went online during the pandemic and raised $120,000 with livestream events. “It’s a regional charity,” says Kwiecinski, “so I was impressed people were down to help, even though Detroit might not be in their backyard.” This year, with safety protocols in place, GRiZMAS once again culminated with a series of GRiZ performances at Detroit’s Masonic Temple. For Kwiecinski, a local kid–turned–international headliner, the goal is to inspire both Detroit youth and his global peers.
“My big hope is that what we’re doing here motivates people to do it in their own way,” says Kwiecinski. “If you’re flying first class to play shows and grab bags but you’re not doing shit to help your community, you’ve got to get after it.”