What is Sun & Sounds?
Sun & Sounds is Scottsdale’s free Sunday concert series on the Civic Center lawn: Arizona bands from noon to 4 p.m. on Sundays in March, in the park’s West Bowl, with a bar, food vendors, artist booths, and a hillside of blankets, strollers and dogs. For thirty-seven years it was called Sunday A’Fair, and most of Old Town still calls it that. Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts renamed it in 2025, “formerly known as Sunday A’Fair,” and trimmed it from a January-to-April run of ten Sundays to four in March.
Scottsdale’s high season runs on tickets, to the golf, the auctions, the galas. This is the city’s standing exception, and it has been since 1988: the arts institutions put top Arizona bands on the Civic Center stage, throw the lawns open, and charge exactly nothing. The 2026 season ran March 8, 15, 22 and 29 with two acts a date, from the Latin bands Jaleo and Bolero Jonze to the funk of Jerusafunk and the country-rock of Silver Lake Rodeo, and the Merchantile Market brought 100-plus local makers to the closing weekend.
The 2027 dates had not been posted as of October 2026; the pattern says Sundays in March. If someone asks what living here is actually like in high season, locals do not describe it. They bring people to this.
How to do it
Arrive by 11:45. The West Bowl is a grass amphitheater that faces the afternoon sun, and the shade line along its upper rim is the day’s only logistics problem. Low-back chairs and blankets are the local uniform; high-back chairs in the front rows earn glares. The music starts at noon and the second act usually goes on around 2.
Park like a local. The free Civic Center Library garage at 3803 N Drinkwater Boulevard, the Second Street garage and the surface lots along Drinkwater are all within two blocks. Sundays in March are also spring training Sundays at Scottsdale Stadium, three blocks south, so the lots fill from 11 on game days.
Eat and drink on site, or bring it. The series now has an expanded food footprint and a cocktail bar, both paid, but it remains the Valley’s most picnic-tolerant event. The Saturday farmers market, at City Hall across the campus, exists to provision it; buy bread and cheese on Saturday and you have Sunday’s lunch.
Bring the dog and the kids. Scottsdale Arts bills the series as lawn-chair and pup friendly, and half the audience is on a leash; the dog guide covers the rest of Old Town. Children have the fountains, the lawns and the sculpture to climb near (not on).
Build the campus day. This is the move that separates regulars from drop-ins. SMoCA borders the lawn for an art break between sets; the sculpture field guide finally explains the LOVE statue and the rest of the collection you have photographed for years; and Old Town’s coffee and ice cream are two flat blocks away. Noon to four fills itself.
Check before driving. The series is four Sundays, not every Sunday, and the lineups post on scottsdalearts.org in the winter. The Merchantile Market weekend, if it returns, is the busiest of the four.
From Sunday A’Fair to Sun & Sounds
For most of its life the series was a winter institution. A typical season, 2016’s, ran ten Sundays from January 10 to April 3 with more than twenty Arizona acts, a Peace and Community Day in January, a Latin and Hispanic culture celebration in March, an artisan market, children’s activities and docent tours of the public art. Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts marked thirty years in 2017. The last pre-pandemic season, 2020, ran nine Sundays from January 12 to March 29, and then the lawns themselves disappeared: the city spent the early 2020s rebuilding the Civic Center, a roughly $33 million renovation completed in 2023 that regraded the grounds into the East and West bowls and added a 360-degree stage.
The series that came back in 2025 was built for the new park. Four March Sundays in the West Bowl, two bands each, a bar, artist vendors, a new name with the old one in parentheses. Scottsdale Arts has not published a reason for the cut from ten dates to four, and the record between 2020 and 2025 is thin; the practical effect is that the free concerts now sit in the single best month of the Scottsdale year rather than spread across the whole season. March Sundays are 75 degrees, the lawn is green, and the city is as full as it gets.
Why free matters here
Sun & Sounds is small, but it is load-bearing civic architecture. Scottsdale’s winter calendar skews expensive and exclusive by design; that is the tourism business model, and a city that produces only ticketed spectacle eventually forgets who it belongs to. The Civic Center campus was built in the 1960s and 1970s on the opposite premise: culture as public infrastructure, like parks and water. A free concert series running since 1988 on those lawns is that premise kept audibly alive, and the budget guide lists it first for a reason.
It also quietly serves Arizona’s music economy. A paying, professionally produced, reliably scheduled outdoor gig in front of a few thousand attentive listeners is a prized booking for the state’s working bands; Valley acts treat a slot as a rite of passage, and the audience gets festival-caliber sets at free-concert expectations.
The Scottsdale angle
Slot it into the season and the Civic Center’s portfolio comes into focus: the Arizona Indian Festival each February, the Dreamy Draw festival on the same lawns each November, and, in earlier eras, the Arts Festival in March and the Culinary Festival in April, both last held in 2019. Sun & Sounds is the connective tissue, the default answer to “what is happening downtown this Sunday” for the best month of the year. Institutions like this do not trend; they compound. Thirty-nine years of Sundays is the proof, and the lawn still has room for your blanket.