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.