ABOUT EAST NASH GRASS:
East Nash Grass exemplifies the best of what bluegrass has to offer — as being named the 2024 IBMA [International Bluegrass Music Association] New Artist of the Year would suggest. But their breathtaking talent as singers, instrumentalists, and composers is just the beginning. While other acts chase their tail in search of nostalgia, the secret to East Nash Grass lies in their unflinching ability to be themselves. It certainly helps that they are a veritable supergroup of award-winners who have been performing longer than anyone would guess that they’ve been alive. With a lifetime of experience in both new and legacy acts (Dan Tyminski, Tim O’Brien, Sierra Hull, Rhonda Vincent, etc.), the tradition of bluegrass is fundamental to who they are as musicians and performers. Yet it’s their irreverent, adventurous, and audacious tendencies as next-gen performers that light a fire under audiences. Their ability to hone this edge was forged in the crucible of a dive bar outside of Nashville, TN that they all but single-handedly put on the (bluegrass) map during their seven-year weekly residency. After hundreds of sets (and countless late-night jams), through personnel changes, industry changes, and a never-ending string of unprecedented world events, East Nash Grass has coalesced into the hair-raising ensemble of Harry Clark [mandolin], Cory Walker [banjo], James Kee [guitar], Maddie Denton [fiddle], and Jeff Partin [bass/dobro]. Their love of both bluegrass and the absurd can be felt in both their live shows and on their new album All God’s Children (Mountain Fever, 2025). Much like watching a bowling ball and feather fall together, expectations of what should and shouldn’t work are challenged as the paradox of authenticity is revealed. Shock leads to excitement as risks keep listeners on the edge of their seats and irrefutable mastery drives home that this is no mere imitation of bluegrass: this IS bluegrass.
ABOUT AJ LEE & BLUE SUMMIT
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 bluegrass festivals until one day, they decided they would be a band.
Currently made up of AJ 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. 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.
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 or emulating other successful groups in their scenes. Instead, they’re most interested in discovering themselves, their own music, and sonics and textures truly their own. And, they’re most interested in doing so with their musical and Californian communities.
City of Glass, as a result, is an album that’s just as much country soul and gritty, bluesy Americana as it is rock club and festival-ready string band fare, all framed through a California folk lens while clearly primed for a much wider audience.
AJ Lee & Blue Summit are an exemplary band so unconcerned with being remembered, with being enshrined, that they have gone about making a set of songs that will surely be held onto and cherished forever. City of Glass may one day crumble, but this music will never fade away.
