Hidden City Sounds: Southern Scratch at the Center

Join us at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido for our new summer series: Hidden City Sounds! This brand new summer music series will fill the Lyric Court with music every Friday from June 7th to October 4th! Enjoy a different genre of live music each week along with DJ’s, food trucks, inflatables, and a cash bar.

Southern Scratch is only the best known of innumerable chicken scratch bands that are now flooding dance halls in the Southwest. Headed by Ron Joaquin, son of legendary waila musician Angelo Joaquin, this Native American-Southwestern crossover is exclusively instrumental and is performed to be danced to. For more than 50 years the Joaquin name has been synonymous with the very best of waila – the popular dance music of the Tohono O’odham (“Desert People”) of the Sonoran desert. Waila dances start at sunset and last until dawn as the People dance to polkas, cumbias, mazurkas, boleros, shottisches and other couple dances performed on saxophone, guitar, bass, bajo sexto, percussion and drums as well as the occasional vocals. While we won’t be going until dawn, we will be dancing the night away with Southern Scratch.