A Music Festival in St. Louis Shows the City Is a Major Pusher of Culture – Here’s Why You Should Add MATI to Your Annual Festival List

This year marked a major milestone for the city of St. Louis. Music at the Intersection, an annual cultural hub of live music, food, and fun, celebrated its fifth anniversary. And they went bigger than ever.

Aside from the major names who hit the stage, including Patti LaBelle, Common, Leon Thomas, Lucky Daye, Leela James, The Womack Sisters and De La Soul – the festival saw an upgrade in attractions. Per usual, it stuck to its core offering with local artisan vendors, live street art activations, and more, but this time added a carnival element and conferences via panel. It’s come a long way since it was first conceptualized around 2018.

Now known as MATI, the annual event is “St. Louis made,” and pays homage to the city’s impact on the Great American Songbook, its relationship to its sister cities along the Mississippi River and the musical genres that have been founded and fostered in the area. Chris Hansen, executive director of the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, says the event was a call to action from the community.

“In around 2018, 2019 we started roundtables. We had about a year and a half of seven committees that were informed by artists, business stakeholders, government officials, and nonprofits – and it was really to think about the things we could do to nurture the music scene here, Hansen explained of the festival’s origins. “There were three calls to action: One was a music festival in our likeness, something that really celebrated St. Louis’s imprint on the American songbook, rooted in our legacy. The other was a conference, more professional development, so we were trying to attract the industry to come to St. Louis. We did a sound diplomacy study and from there understood our strengths, some of our weaknesses, and then where we could start building avenues towards new policies, new ordinances and things that we could do to really just ensure this is a great place for people to come and build their business in the creative arts, but also the ones that we have here are starting to have some upward mobility. So that call to action led us to launch this.”

There have been roadblocks. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival was paused in both 2020 and 2021, and rebuilding wasn’t easy, considering fear with mass gatherings and such, and government mandates on maximum capacities. “That was only a 25% cap at the time, so we did it in the indoor venues here in the district.”

Five years later, the festival has attracted everyone from Chaka Khan and Erykah Badu as headliners. It’s a chance to show why St. Louis, which is the birthplace and rearing of the likes of Josephine Baker, shouldn’t be slept on as a musical marker.

The festival has a ton to offer tourists, but also its locals. As the area that houses the festival continues to grow, organizers wanted to intentionally showcase its neighbors.

“We wanted to make sure we weren’t blocking them out and kind of boxing everything in. We wanted to make it really accessible so we’ve created an environment where you don’t have to have a pass to come into this footprint,” Hansen explained. Through a carefully curated expansion, locals are able to participate in various aspects of the festival.

“You can go to the market, you can go to the food truck. There’s programming for everyone. There’s things to do for family, but if you want to go and experience everything, there are different credentials you can access. You can go to panels and workshops and clinics. You can get into different community curations, go see great public art, but if you want to go the whole thing, you have to buy the full main stage. So that accessibility was really key this year,” Hansen drives home.

Attendees experienced a DJ lounge that housed a DJ residency equipped with 12 resident DJs, a contemporary art program where they could hear everything on the turntables from hip hop to jazz and classical. Chuck D, Public Enemy’s frontman, had his personally curated art collection on display at his own exhibit. Fans of the hip hop pioneer could actually purchase their own Chuck D original. 

Typically, the festival has attracted 10,000 over a two-day period. An estimated 17,000 attended this year’s events held at Grand Center. And it keeps the community as its focus, so much so that this year, $10 from each MATI pass was donated to help in tornado relief efforts as many of its residents continue to deal with the remnants from a tornado that hit the city in May.