AJ Lee & Blue Summit | The Fretliners

One night featuring TWO incredible bluegrass bands!

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 – their product feels mature and fully realized, while deep in the Blue Summit pocket.

The Fretliners (Tom Knowlton – guitar, Sam Parks – mandolin, Dan Andree – fiddle, Taylor Shuck – bass) are a genuine and powerful bluegrass quartet recognized for their songwriting and undeniable chemistry. Their newfound camaraderie produces an energy that is as infectious on stage as it is on record. So much so that in the summer of 2023, they won both band competitions at Telluride Bluegrass and Rockygrass Festivals—a feat that had only been accomplished once before. That September, they released their debut eponymous album to acclaim and adoration.