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 AJ 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!”

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. Lee & Blue Summit seem unconcerned with mimicking hugely successful jamgrass bands, or making competitive and performatively intellectual new acoustic music, or wishing to establish themselves as the superlative string band in their bluegrass, old-time, and Americana communities. Instead, they’re most interested in discovering themselves, their own music, and sonics and textures truly their own.

The group is proud to be Californian, proud to represent the neo-traditionalist bluegrass and folk from the state and the mighty communities surrounding them. Their music shines with this “think global, act local” sort of approach.

Perhaps this is why it feels like, whether on stage or in the studio, Blue Summit pours all of themselves into every song, every lyric, and every note.

Their first label release, City of Glass, was released via Signature Sounds this July.