Twenty-three years after she closed M’s Fine and Mellow Café, a haven for jazz and folk music on downtown’s Third Street, Marian Pickett is back in the music business.
Happening on Thursday, Oct. 23, at the Mid City Ballroom, the Jeff Gardner Nola Nova 3 is the next offering in Pickett’s newly launched Miss M Presents performing arts series.
Pickett presided over M’s Fine and Mellow Café from 1993 to 2002. A restaurant and bar, the business was most importantly a music venue. Pickett even squeezed a grand piano into the small space, one worthy of the world-class jazz pianists she presented.
Marian Pickett has recently launched her Miss M Presents performing arts series at Mid City Ballroom in Baton Rouge.
M’s music menu also featured such singer-songwriters as the late Spencer Bohren from New Orleans, British singer-songwriter Martin Simpson and, several months before his song, “Lullaby,” hit the Top 10, Shawn Mullins.
Pickett’s open-minded booking policy likewise gave a stage to musicians at the beginning of their careers. Then and now, they addressed her as “Miss M.”
“I chose the name Miss M Presents because all the young people who played at my little café called me Miss M,” she said. “To me, it’s a term of endearment and respect. It feels good to hear it, and it feels good to be a part of this new endeavor.”
Pioneering the listening room concept in Baton Rouge, Pickett’s café preceded such later venues as Henry Turner Jr.’s Listening Room, John Burns’ Dyson House and Chris Maxwell’s Red Dragon Listening Room.
Marian Pickett, former owner of M’s Café, shows a 20-year-old M’s Café T-shirt at her home.
“M’s was a huge inspiration,” Maxwell said. “I would never have started the Red Dragon if she hadn’t closed in the aftermath of 9/11.”
Indeed, Pickett ended her first era as a music-promoter, she said, “because people quit going out” after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001.
James Fogle, co-owner of the Mid City Ballroom, began lobbying Pickett to return to music when his performance venue opened eight years ago. Their association dates to the first days of M’s Fine and Mellow Café, where he performed many times, in bands, duos and solo, collected cover charges at the door and emceed open mics.
“I totally appreciated what she was doing back then,” Fogle said. “We’re diverse at the ballroom now, but I’d like to do more jazz and blues and singer-songwriters and folk music. M has got millions of contacts from doing all that kind of thing, and I’d love to bring that stuff back.”
“I couldn’t have a better playing ground than Mid City Ballroom,” Pickett said. “It’s a great listening room, a venue that was begging for me to come there.”
Initially, Pickett intends to produce two events a month, ideally a folk show and a jazz performance. She’s not in it to make money.
“Luckily,” she said with a laugh, “I was not in it for the money before either.”
At the ballroom, Pickett wants to re-create the atmosphere of M’s Fine and Mellow Café via low lights and tables covered with classy tablecloths. Seating capacity is about 100.
“It is work, especially setting everything up in the beginning,” she said. “I look forward to the time when I’m only booking the shows. And I hope this time around I know what I’m doing.”
Because she’s recruited a nine-member board of directors, all of them friends, Pickett won’t be going it alone this time.
“I was on my own before,” she recalled. “Many a day it was just me drowning in something so much bigger than me. The board members are there to help me at things I’m not so good at. They’re jumping in like crazy, and it’s making all the difference.”
Maxwell plans to help, too, by spreading the word about Miss M Presents shows to his Red Dragon audience.
“I love what she did before and hope she can gain an audience,” he said. “Baton Rouge needs what Miss M has to offer.”
Music has been part of Pickett’s life since her childhood in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Her music-loving mother was a classical pianist and piano teacher.
“Our mother knew not to teach my siblings and I herself,” Pickett said. “She sent us to the best teacher in town. She knew we wouldn’t listen to her.”
Before Pickett moved to Baton Rouge in 1977, she made sure the city had a music scene. Prior to opening M’s Fine and Mellow Café, she worked as a circulation district manager for The Advocate from 1979 to 1992.
Music proved a lifelong calling. She revels most of all in in-person musical performance.
“I drink it up,” she said. “I love watching musicians communicate with each other and solo. I love being a part of that, in the room. I’m excited about having that room again.”
