AJ Lee & Blue Summit

bluegrass · newgrass · americana

AJ Lee & Blue Summit is a bluegrass band from Santa Cruz, California, built around mandolinist and singer AJ Lee with guitarists Sullivan Tuttle and Scott Gates and fiddler Jan Purat. The members met as teenagers at Northern California bluegrass festivals and jams, in particular the California Bluegrass Association's Father's Day Festival in Grass Valley, where by Lee's account the group was declared a band on the spot. Lee played her first show at the age of four at a pizzeria open mic and spent her early years performing with the Tuttles, the family band led by Jack Tuttle that also included Sullivan and his sister Molly Tuttle; she and Sullivan started Blue Summit in 2015. The band self-released Like I Used To in 2019 and I'll Come Back in 2021, took top honors in the FreshGrass band contest in 2019, and the same year Lee won the International Bluegrass Music Association's Momentum Award for vocalist of the year. Their third album, City of Glass, released in July 2024, was their first for the Massachusetts label Signature Sounds and was produced by Lech Wierzynski of The California Honeydrops. It was also the first record on which lead vocals and songwriting rotate among the members, with Gates contributing a Bakersfield country streak and Tuttle a more indie-leaning guitar approach. A covers project, Cover to Cover, followed, trailed by a reading of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's Fishin' in the Dark. The band's material sits between traditional bluegrass, country soul and bluesy Americana filtered through a California folk sensibility, and the group plays several hundred dates a year, working listening rooms and theaters such as the Stoughton Opera House in Wisconsin and The Grey Eagle in Asheville alongside the national festival circuit and the Grand Ole Opry.

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Upcoming shows in Wisconsin

Where they play in Wisconsin

Upcoming shows in North Carolina

Where they play in North Carolina

Shared bills in North Carolina