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Boyle Heights kids used to hang out there by the hour, testing the marimbas and eyeing the Fender guitars. Louie Perez and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos were among the future stars who'd drop by. English, Japanese and Spanish harmonized in a background chorus of chatter. Payment was accepted in pesos.
And no matter how long you stayed, or how much money you had, or didn't, no one ever told you to beat it.
From the late 1930s through the 1980s, Phillips Music Co. wasn't simply a place to buy instruments and check out the latest vinyl offerings in Latin jazz, classical, rock, Cuban mambo and Yiddish swing. It also was a kind of community living room, says Josh Kun, a USC associate professor of journalism, the bricks-and-mortar embodiment of "this mythic, utopian, Jewish-Mexican-Japanese" enclave that marked time before and after World War II to a klezmer-mariachi-taiko beat.
"Boyle Heights is the poster neighborhood for deep community in Los Angeles, and of the possibility of working it out, finding a way to live side by side and speak each other's language," Kun says.
Saturday evening at California Plaza, a tri-lingual crew of musicians and storytellers will try to reanimate that idyllic era with a multimedia program dubbed "A Night at the Phillips Music Company."
Part of the Grand Performances annual summer series of free concerts and performances, the program will bring together...