DRIGGS, Idaho — Ready to jam to roots-style bluegrass at Music on Main this week?
Grab those dancing shoes and head to Victor City Park to join Teton Valley Foundation for an unforgettable concert. An an award-winning, energetic, charming and technically jaw-dropping Bluegrass band, AJ Lee & Blue Summit is quickly rising on the national roots music scene.
Based in Santa Cruz, California, the group members met as teenagers, picking and jamming together as kids at local bluegrass festivals, until one day, they decided they would become a band. Currently made up of AJ Lee on mandolin, fiddler Jan Purat and guitarists Scott Gates and Sullivan Tuttle, the band still carries a youthful, festival-parking-lot energy with them today, combined with a genuine ease and confidence in their music-making.
As they ready their third studio album, “City of Glass,” their first label release, out July 19 via Signature Sounds, their product feels mature and fully realized.
“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.”
“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 scene. Instead, they’re most interested in discovering themselves, their own music and their own sonics and textures. 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.
Music starts at 6 p.m. on Thursday, June 27, with One Ton Pig opening. Concert ends at 10 p.m.
Tonight’s concert is in loving memory of a dear friend, Kathy Potts. Kathy loved dancing it up at Music on Main, and she also loved to golf. TVF thought it was only appropriate to make sure the raffle was in her honor as well with a golf round for four at Tributary for this Thursday’s prize.
Concerts are a suggested donation of $5. Birch Street Food Court has 10 vendors this summer for dinner options. Please, no outside alcohol.
Discount codes for local hotels, Teton Motel, Teton Valley Resort and The Cobblestone, are available for Music on Main concertgoers. Head to TetonValleyFoundation.org for more information.
