AJ Lee & Blue Summit are an award-winning, energetic, charming, and technically jaw-dropping band quickly rising on the national roots music scene. Based in Santa Cruz, California, the group met as teenagers, picking and jamming together as kids at local bluegrass festivals until one day, they decided they would be a band.
Currently made up of AJ Lee on mandolin, fiddler Jan Purat, and guitarists Scott Gates and Sullivan Tuttle, the band carries that youthful, festival-parking-lot energy with them still today, but at the same time there’s a genuine ease and confidence to their music making. As they ready their third studio album, City of Glass – their first label release, out July 19th via Signature Sounds – their product feels mature and fully realized, while deep in the Blue Summit pocket.
City of Glass is a slow burn album, remarkable when considered alongside records released by their peers in recent years. Lee & Blue Summit seem unconcerned with mimicking or emulating other successful groups in their scenes. Instead, they’re most interested in discovering themselves, their own music, and sonics and textures truly their own. And, they’re most interested in doing so with their musical and Californian communities.
City of Glass, as a result, is an album that’s just as much country soul and gritty, bluesy Americana as it is rock club and festival-ready string band fare, all framed through a California folk lens while clearly primed for a much wider audience.
AJ Lee & Blue Summit are an exemplary band so unconcerned with being remembered, with being enshrined, that they have gone about making a set of songs that will surely be held onto and cherished forever. City of Glass may one day crumble, but this music will never fade away.
