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Free 4 All music festival will fill 10 St. Louis venues for one September weekend

Hundreds of festival-goers wait outside of The Big Top on Washington Avenue during a recent Music at the Intersection Festival.
Music at the Intersection Festival
The Big top in Grand Center, shown during a past Music at the Intersection Festival, will be one of 10 venues hosting St. Louis musicians during the Free 4 All festival on Sept. 6 and 7.

A new music festival is headed for Grand Center in St. Louis. Organizers liken the locally focused event to an opening act for Music at the Intersection, the three-day festival now headed toward its fifth year.

Free 4 All will feature 100 bands across 10 venues on Sept. 6 and 7. Organizers expect 4,000 attendees. MATI begins Sept. 12.

“It’s meant to feel like an event — the Super Bowl of local concerts,” said cultural journalist and former KDHX DJ Joseph Hess. “A holiday that celebrates local music just seems to make sense, and I know how to do it.”

While MATI offers a mix of national headliners, local artists who’ve had success touring nationally and St. Louis artists with less of a foothold in the music industry, Free 4 All will be all local artists.

Hess and co-organizer Michael Landau, co-founder of recording studio, are looking for artists who’ve recorded at least some of their music and have experience playing live — but they hope festival attendees will discover local artists who have a lower profile or play gigs infrequently.

Interested artists to perform at Free 4 All online.

“One goal is to allow bands that may have not had a platform to have a platform. Another is to allow audiences to discover these bands that they may not have known and to develop that connection,” Landau said.

, which produces MATI, is donating use of many of its venues — including the , two performance spaces at , , the , and , a burger joint and music venue that Kranzberg had been planning to launch with a soft opening during MATI. Free 4 All producers will also produce festival performances at and Urban Chestnut’s .

Hess was a booker for the music festival that the Riverfront Times produced for 18 years, ending in .

“I’ve had strangers reach out to me year after year, asking me if I know of any event like that. I assumed that someone else would pop up with a similar kind of concept. To me, a gigantic, musically diverse, all-local music festival is a no-brainer,” Hess added.

announced its daily schedule last week. Headliners on Sept. 12 include Coco & Breezy and Barrington Levy. The next day, Common & Pete Rock, Lucky Daye and John Medeski’s Mad Skillet will perform. Patti LaBelle, Leon Thomas, De La Soul and Branford Marsalis top the bill on the festival’s final day.

Jeremy is the arts & culture reporter at © 2024 .