AJ Lee & Blue Summit's latest disc, City of Glass, is a slow burn album, remarkable when considered alongside records released by their peers in recent years. 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. So, when they went into the studio to track City of Glass and its gorgeous twelve tracks, they once again forsook the roads most traveled by, looking to their local California community for collaborators that also feel right at home in their chosen family band. They brought in Lech Wierzynski, of the California Honeydrops, to produce; they tapped Bay Area steel guitarist Mikiya Matsuda for a couple of tracks; plus they had Californian banjo player, instructor, and Father’s Day Fest veteran Luke Abbott lend five-string to a number. 

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. On a track called, “Can’t Find You At All,” they even included a sort of reunion of “The Tuttles featuring AJ Lee” – the true family band from their early childhoods that also included Lee, Sully Tuttle, Grammy Award winner Molly Tuttle, and their father Jack Tuttle – who wrote “Can’t Find You At All”.