AJ Lee & Blue Summit w. Chicken Wire Empire

Name: AJ Lee & Blue Summit w. Chicken Wire Empire
Start: 2026-01-17T20:00:00-06:00
Location: Evanston SPACE

Schedule

Sat, 17 Jan, 2026 at 08:00 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

Evanston SPACE | Evanston, IL

AJ Lee 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 Fathers Day Bluegrass Festival held in the Sierra Nevada foothills Someone said, All of us right here, were a band now. We kind of didnt take it seriously, but we were like, okay, well be a band!And thank goodness they became a band. Their first gigs were local, small venues, cafes, restaurants, coffee shops, where theyd 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 its fun and its 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 theres 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. Its 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. City of Glass is a slow burn album, remarkable when considered alongside records released by their peers in recent years. Lee 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 Fathers Day Fest veteran Luke Abbott lend five-string to a number.
Sale Dates and Times:
Public Onsale : Thu, 28 Aug 2025 at 10:00 AM