By Brian Cox
Legal News
His is Miles Davis.
Over by the bar there, that’s Billie Holliday.
On the wall across the room is Ray Charles. Tommy Dorsey and Louis Armstrong are hanging around down here as well.
The framed black-and-white photos on the walls of the Jazz Café in the lower level of Detroit’s Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts are merely snapshots of the long parade of artists who have performed at the theater since its opening more than 80 years ago.
Alex Parrish, a senior partner at Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn, LLP and chairman of Music Hall’s board of trustees, lauds the theater’s history as he gives a tour of the building on Madison in downtown Detroit.
“I am told that Detroit has more theater seats than any city east of the Mississippi other than New York,” he says as he strolls down a side aisle of the 1,700-seat theater, pointing out the ornate ceiling and the theater’s perfect sight lines and astounding acoustics.
Detroit, Parrish says, is among the top two or three cities in the country in terms of having a rich and influential musical heritage, but that history largely goes unheralded — at least here at home.
“When people think of Detroit and music, they think Motown,” he says, “but there’s much more than that.”
Music Hall stands as a testament to his claim.
Over the span of nearly nine decades, the floorboards of Music Hall have felt the trod of the brightest entertainment stars of each generation, from Tallulah Bankhead to Ella Fitzgerald and from George M. Cohan to Little Richard.
“And on top of that, all the great jazz performers have appeared here,” notes Parrish. “It’s a pretty long, incredible list.”
Built in 1928 for $3 million by Matilda Rausch Dodge Wilson who was tired of traveling to New York to see theater, Music Hall in ensuing years became home to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the Michigan Opera Theater. In 1953, it was converted into the world’s second Cinerama theater, featuring an enormous curved screen, three synchronized projectors, and seven channels of stereophonic sound. Twenty years later, Music Hall was scheduled to be razed and was saved only weeks before the wrecking ball was set to strike. It was reinvented as a nonprofit performing arts center.
New life was again breathed into Music Hall in 1995 when it underwent a $6.5 million renovation, but the investment could not ensure the theater’s future as a vital Detroit performance venue. By 2004, after losing some $1 million the previous three years as producer of the Detroit International Jazz Festival, the theater was running a deficit of $800,000 and was on the verge of fading into obscurity.
The following year, Parrish was elected chairman of the board. He was the ideal man for the position and the times.
“I happen to be someone who loves and appreciates theater and music and has a real interest in community development in Detroit,” says the 53-year-old Parrish, who grew up in Memphis listening to jazz and R&B, playing percussion, and entertaining the idea for a while of trying to make a living composing and arranging music.
Chairman of Music Hall’s 80-member board of trustees is a role that has turned out to be particularly well suited for Parrish’s talents and expertise in the areas of capital formation, reorganizations, and workouts. He played a leading role in straightening out Music Hall’s fiscal knots and outlining the theater’s future mission.
“My leadership in something like Music Hall is fairly typical for a senior partner at Honigman,” says Parrish, who came to Detroit in 1985 to clerk for Judge Damon Keith. “It’s part of the culture of the law firm. We are the quintessential Detroit law firm and it manifests itself in our leaders serving the community in this way.”
He points to firm founder, Alan E. Schwartz, and partners David Page, Alan S. Schwartz, and Denise Lewis as other examples.
Recognizing that in recent decades Music Hall had lost some of its gleam and faded under the emerging shadows of other performance venues, Parrish set about forging a long-term strategic plan for the historic theater that would ensure it a place in the city’s cultural landscape. Trustees Joyce Hayes Giles and Elaine McMahon led that effort for him.
“We’re not the symphony, we’re not the opera,” says Parrish. “On the other hand, we’re not the big rock show at the Palace (of Auburn Hills).”
The question at the heart of the strategic plan Parrish initiated was essential to the theater’s future success: What was its identity?
What emerged from the strategic study was a mission for Music Hall centered on education and culturally diverse programming, with an emphasis on jazz, dance and theater. The board searched for a president and artistic director who could achieve its unique vision. They found the energetic and Detroit native Vince Paul, who returned from New York (where he was heading up a touring management company) to embrace the challenge enthusiastically.
As a result, Parrish recalls recently seeing at Music Hall a Chinese acrobat perform one night and the next listening to a Polish choir. A night or two later he caught a show by a 12-member girls’ band from Japan.
“We bring communities together,” says Parrish. “That’s one of our key missions. And here at Music Hall, you have folks involved from all over the metropolitan area. That kind of melting pot makes things pretty interesting.”
The second arm of the theater’s mission is a focus on education that touches some 25,000 children a year through efforts such as a jazz vocal education program developed in partnership with Anita Baker and a jazz appreciation program designed by Wynton Marsalis. There is also a major dance education program called “Stars of Ballet and Broadway.”
“We never know what kind of impact we’re going to have on a kid,” says Parrish. “If you go into our population today, you’ll find a lot of talent in our youth. The problem is they have no where to play, which is why it’s all the more important we’re here for them at Music Hall.”
Director Paul has quick praise for Parrish’s leadership as chairman of the board of trustees.
“To look at Alex’s contribution to the Hall is to look at his contribution to the city,” says Paul. “He and the board view the Music Hall as their flagship for a larger mission. He is very cognizant that we have a megaphone and that we can help move the community forward.”
Other attorneys active at Music Hall include Elliott Hall, Sue Ellen Eisenberg, David Gaskin, Judge Susan Borman, David Jaffe, Judge Claudia Morcom, Phyllis Morey, Randolph Phifer, Peggy Pitt, and Phyllis Snow.
Parrish’s plans for Music Hall’s future concentrate on the theater’s new core mission and growing key areas. He would like to see Music Hall integrated more into the community and become more involved in schools with performances outside the theater.
“Music Hall is definitely moving in the right direction—for example, it’s now open almost every night for live performances. But the challenge right now,” Parrish says, “is weathering these incredibly hard economic times, which have made fund-raising more difficult than ever.”
He sees the performing arts center as intimately and inextricably linked with the city’s vibrant musical past as well as its rejuvenated future.
“It’s surprising how people in town don’t know how much Detroit has to offer,” says Parrish. “In Detroit, we have cultural offerings of a scale and quality that rival any world-class city. It’s a legacy worth fighting hard to preserve.”
— This story first ran in the Winter 2010 issue of MOTION.
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