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 music festivals and jams
until one day, they decided they would be a band.
“Our roots go really deep,” explains de facto band leader Lee. “We met when we were young
kids… We definitely decided to choose each other as a chosen family band later on in life, but in
a lot of ways it was naturally just like that in the beginning.”
“It was like one of those late at night things,” she continued. “We were sitting on a trailer at
Grass Valley” at the annual Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival held in the Sierra Nevada foothills
– “Someone said, ‘All of us right here, we’re a band now.’ We kind of didn’t take it seriously, but
we were like, okay, we’ll be a band!”
And thank goodness they became a band. Their first gigs were local, small venues, cafes,
restaurants, coffee shops, where they’d play for multiple hours honing their set list and learning
shared musical vocabularies. Now, as they criss-cross the country performing hundreds of
shows a year to larger and larger audiences, you can sense the intention they had back then –
to make music together not for just aspirational reasons, but because it’s fun – and it’s all you
want to do as young musicians.
Currently made up of 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. This is not
the bluegrass of ambitious musicians intent on industry success, this is music made firstly for
the joy of making it and primarily made for each other. It’s part of why, as they ready their third
studio album, City of Glass – their first label release, out July 19th via Signature Sounds