The sixth annual Mesa Music Festival is making a major post-pandemic comeback. After a three-year hiatus, the free-to-the-public, three-day festival returns to downtown Mesa Thursday, April 13 through Saturday, April 15. A truly jam-packed weekend, the event will feature more than 200 performances by local and international artists and offers food and art from local vendors along the block of Main and MacDonald streets.
The festival has a freewheeling structure, where attendees can hop from venue to venue to check out different artists while stopping for food, shopping for locally crafted goods or exploring the Mesa city center along the way. Participating venues include The Nile Theater, Oro Brewing, Chupacabra Taproom, Smitholator Cookie Shop and Organic Bean Café.
Although the MMF is headlined by renowned talent like Everclear, LA Guns, Dreamers, Creature Canyon, Lucius Arthur and Mallory Merk, the focus is on hundreds of up-and-coming artists. This has been the set format since the festival’s inception in 2015.
According to the festival’s promoter and lead organizer Indian Antao, the MMF is known for propagating “the click moment.” Adopted from the title of a book by Swedish author Frans Johansson, Antao defines it as “the aha moment or the Eureka moment.” He says the click moment cannot be manufactured en masse but “you can create the environment where it can occur. I’m all about that — creating the opportunity where magic can happen.”
Antao creates this environment for budding musicians through his music festivals. Prior to Mesa, he organized the Jersey Shore Festival in Seaside Heights, New Jersey for 13 years under the same free-to-the-public model.
At 56, Antao has worked in the music industry for the past 30 years. Starting in New Jersey, he promoted local, regional, national and international talent before working at TVT Records in the 1990s and starting his own record label, Gig Records, in 1999. He ultimately founded his own marketing company, Motor Media, in 2007. Antao has gone on to work with renowned musicians like KISS, ACDC, Radiohead, Lady Gaga and more.
Through his experiences, Antao’s motivation in providing a free platform for musicians is simple. “Helping the band from the beginning… and seeing them blow up,” he says. “I love to see the whole emergence — how a band goes from nothing to something.”
This philosophy has been the foundation of the Mesa Music Festival — providing a platform for artists to showcase their work and talent while simultaneously giving Valley residents free access to a music festival experience from their own backyard. “We’ve got equally notable local bands,” says Ami Rogers, the executive vice president of operations and artist development at Atlanta- and Phoenix-based label, 59 X Records. The festival highlights “undiscovered gems coming from as far as Hong Kong [and] British Columbia.”
Rogers currently represents This Modern, a Mesa-based new-age rock band that blends classic rock with the modern elements of pop, punk, nu metal and rap. She has represented the band since 2018 when they first performed at the MMF.
“It’s been pretty interesting because they’ve all kind of graduated from college and got jobs and they started the studio,” Rogers says. “Seeing them grow not only as musicians and entertainers, [and] seeing them grow to be more established producers in the community, working with bigger artists, it’s just been really, really rewarding to see them not only as evolve as young men and people, but as music creators and also helping other people realize their dreams as musicians.”
This Modern is preparing for its fourth appearance at the MMF, and even though they have grown as a collective and achieved higher amounts of success, the band always makes a point to return to the Mesa Music Festival because it “was the biggest and best thing that we ever did,” says lead singer Marcus Reardon. “There’s not a ton of people who have come out of Mesa, so it’s nice to be one of the more prominent artists out here … it means everything to us for sure.”
For Jay Redlyne, CEO of Redlyne Management, the Mesa Music Festival is “what South by Southwest used to be when it started out. It’s a true meeting of artists and music lovers from all over, but it’s stationed here in Arizona.”
Redlyne represents Christopher Shayne Strickler and his eponymous band, Christopher Shayne, who will be performing at the MMF this year for the third time. Strickler, who is from Scottsdale, grew up listening to and playing old blues-style music. Strickler describes it as southern rock inflected with “old school Guns N’ Roses — flying by the seat of our pants, kind of rock and roll.”
According to Strickler, the beauty of the MMF lies in the “smattering of different music styles and different artists.” It is not uncommon to see an acoustic set followed by a reggae band.
There is a profound sense of freedom at the MMF, where people can explore different sets and performances at their own pace and leisure, Redlyne adds. “It’s the perfect weekend… You’re going to hear something you like. If you don’t, you just walk another 10 feet and there’s maybe a band that’s playing something that’s in your wheelhouse.”
Antao says he has high hopes for this year’s festival and the city as a whole. “I think it’d be great to make Mesa the next big music city,” he says. “It’s actually happening where Mesa, in the next few years, will be like a Memphis.”
“Let’s show ’em how the West does it. You’re in our town,” Strickler says. “Let’s see if you can stand up in our Wild West kind of energy here.”
For more information about this year’s Mesa Music Festival, visit the official website.
