AJ Lee & Blue Summit

Rising stars in the national roots music scene, AJ Lee & Blue Summit are award-winning, energetic, and charming, with technical skills that are jaw-dropping. Based in Santa Cruz, California, the band formed organically. As teenagers, they met at local music festivals, jamming in parking lots and trading songs until one day, the pieces came together: they were a band.  

“Our roots go really deep,” lead vocalist and mandolin player AJ Lee said. “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.”

Their early gigs were local: small venues, cafes, restaurants, and coffee shops, where they’d play for multiple hours honing their set list and learning shared musical vocabularies. Now they tour coast to coast, performing hundreds of shows a year to growing audiences. Featuring Lee on mandolin, Jan Purat on fiddle, and guitarists Scott Gates and Sullivan Tuttle, the group carries a youthful spirit and tight-knit camaraderie to the stage. There is an undeniable ease and authenticity in their music: this isn’t bluegrass made for the charts, this is music made for the joy of making it.  

Their  third studio album and first label release, City of Glass, is a slow burn 12-track collection that blends country soul, gritty Americana, and bluegrass with a distinctly California folk sensibility. Throughout the album, an overarching sense emerges that this is a band who knows who they are, what they are trying to say, and who can help them say it. The title track is an evocative metaphor that conjures the climate crisis  and human kind’s achievements, likening humanity’s fragile constructs both literal and artistic to a  temporal city made of glass, grain by grain, shard by shard

Each song on City of Glass unfolds with intention, inviting listeners on a journey full of heartfelt twists and turns. AJ Lee & Blue Summit’s City of Glass is a monument not to ego and virtuosity, but to what happens when musicians who know each other so deeply choose to show up with heart, humility, and harmony.  

City of Glass may one day crumble, but the music of AJ Lee & Blue Summit will never fade away.