What it means
Sunday A’Fair is what Scottsdale called its free Sunday concerts on the Civic Center lawn for 37 years, and what a good share of the city still calls them. The format barely changed: on selected Sundays from January into April, from noon to four, two or three Arizona bands played to a slope of blankets and low chairs while a pop-up arts market, kids’ activities and free admission to SMoCA filled the breaks. No ticket, no dress code, no bad seats. You will hear it from a neighbor in February (“we’re going to Sunday A’Fair, bring a chair”) and from anyone who has lived here long enough to have claimed a particular patch of grass.
Since 2025 the series has run under a new name, Sun & Sounds, in the renovated Civic Center’s West Bowl, on Sundays in March. The Sunday A’Fair event guide has the regular’s playbook; this page is about the name.
Where you’ll meet it
In the memories of anyone describing Scottsdale winters, on old posters in the Center for the Performing Arts, in city calendars that now say Sun & Sounds, and on the lawn itself, the one at Scottsdale Civic Center between City Hall and the library. It pairs naturally with the Saturday farmers market a block away and makes the first entry in any honest list of free things to do in Scottsdale.
Where the word came from
The name is a pun, “affair” folded into “fair,” and nobody has claimed it. It arrived with the series itself in 1988, when the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, the Bennie Gonzales building that had opened on the Civic Center in October 1975, began throwing its lawns open on winter Sundays during the season when everything else in town charged resort prices. A December 2018 announcement of the coming January kickoff called it the 32nd season, which puts the first in 1988, the figure this site uses; the Center’s own materials have said “more than 30 years” without naming a date.
The series grew into a fixture without changing much. By the 2010s a season meant about ten Sundays and more than 20 acts drawn from the state’s working blues, jazz, Latin, soul and country bands, with themed Sundays for Latin culture celebrations and community days, docent tours of the Civic Center’s sculpture collection, and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, which borders the lawn, letting people in free. Nationwide was the presenting sponsor in the 2019 season. The producer by then went by Scottsdale Arts, the nonprofit that runs the Center, SMoCA and the city’s public art program; its history is in the Scottsdale Arts guide.
Then the lawn changed. The city’s 2019 bond paid for a $27.3 million rebuild of the Civic Center’s public spaces, regrading the grass into bowls with permanent stages, and when the concerts came back in 2025 they came back as Sun & Sounds, “formerly known as Sunday A’Fair,” on four March Sundays in the West Bowl. The 2026 season ran on Sundays in March, with the Merchantile Market of local makers folded into the afternoon and a bar on the lawn.
What it is not
Sunday A’Fair is not the ArtWalk, which is Thursday nights in the galleries, and not the Scottsdale Arts Festival, the ticketed March weekend on the same campus. It is not a ticketed concert at the Center, either. The one word that matters is free.
The fine print
The rename is recent enough that the record is thin. Scottsdale Arts has not published an explanation for retiring the old name; the 2025 listings simply added “formerly known as Sunday A’Fair” and moved on, and the 2026 listings dropped the parenthetical. The Center itself was celebrating its 50th anniversary season in 2025-26, which is probably why the marketing was refreshed, though that is an inference and not a statement from the organization.
The calendar shifted with the name. Sunday A’Fair ran from mid-January to early April, roughly ten dates; Sun & Sounds has run on Sundays in March only, four dates in 2025 and the March Sundays in 2026, noon to four, with concerts at 12:00 and 2:00 or thereabouts. The address is 7380 East Second Street, with free garage parking.
The status here is “faded” in the narrow sense that the name is off the posters, not that the thing is gone. In conversation the old name is doing fine, and it will keep doing fine as long as the people who learned Scottsdale in the 1990s are still spreading blankets. The Civic Center Mall entry covers the older name for the campus itself, which went through the same kind of quiet retirement.