AJ Lee & Blue Summit are an award-winning, energetic, and technically jaw-dropping bluegrass band quickly rising on the national roots music scene. Based in Santa Cruz, California, the group met as teenagers, picking together as kids at local bluegrass festivals until one day, they decided they would be a band. Their Signature Sounds debut, City of Glass is a spellbinding collection of original songs and covers 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. City of Glass not only focuses on AJ Lee’s songwriting and once in a generation voice, but also features the Bakersfield sound of guitarist and second lead vocalist Scott Gates on three tracks along with the guitar wizardry and indie rock influence of Sullivan Tuttle, the younger brother of Bluegrass superstar Molly Tuttle.
There are a mere handful of guitarists that have changed the way we think about the guitar over the past five or six decades. Pat Martino is perhaps one of the greatest and best-known of those icons. The term “genius” is overused today, but Pat Martino was definitely one. His life story was the very definition of the word. Before Martino's passing in November, 2021, the Alternative Guitar Summit honored him and his enormous contribution to jazz in this set of studio recordings by 14 jazz guitarists playing selections from his imaginative and varied catalog of compositions. Producer Joel Harrison is thrilled to have brought together this crew of great musicians to show their love for him while HighNote Records is proud to present this first volume of their recordings.
A tech-savvy, all-instrumental progressive metal group from Los Angeles. The origins of Scale the Summit date to 2004, when guitarists Chris Letchford and Travis LeVrier met as students at the Los Angeles Musicians Institute, then came into contact with fellow scholar and drummer Pat Skeffington, before completing their lineup with bassist Jordan Eberhardt several months later. Two years of rehearsal and sonic self-discovery followed until, at the end of 2006, all of the musicians relocated to Letchford's hometown of Houston, Texas and finished sculpting their exceptionally technical brand of "adventure metal," as they like to call it, for release on a self-financed debut album, immodestly named Monument. Turns out their confidence was largely justified by the impressive amalgam of progressive exploration (think Cynic, Dream Theater, Kong)…
Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were (and are) two of the main stems of jazz. Any way you look at it, just about everything that's ever happened in this music leads directly – or indirectly – back to them. Both men were born on the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries, and each became established as a leader during the middle '20s. Although their paths had crossed from time to time over the years, nobody in the entertainment industry had ever managed to get Armstrong and Ellington into a recording studio to make an album together. On April 3, 1961, producer Bob Thiele achieved what should be regarded as one of his greatest accomplishments; he organized and supervised a seven-and-a-half-hour session at RCA Victor's Studio One on East 24th Street in Manhattan, using a sextet combining Duke Ellington with Louis Armstrong & His All-Stars.
THE SUMMIT: The Manhattan Transfer meets Take 6 is one of the most unique and thrilling musical collaborations ever assembled. With twenty Grammy Awards between them, these two musically iconic groups have joined forces to perform together…
This unassuming and delightful little album visits a time when jazz and blues were still directly entwined, drawing on the ghosts of guitarists like Charlie Christian, Eddie Durham, Bill Jennings, Tiny Grimes, Barney Kessel, and Kenny Burrell, guitarists who used the blues to enrich the jazz pieces they played on, a kind of ensemble contribution that is all too frequently missing on the contemporary blues scene. Duke Robillard, Jay Geils, and Gerry Beaudoin are all gifted guitar players, each with his own career, but as a trio working three-part harmony lines around each other, they bring a stately ensemble grace to the tracks on New Guitar Summit (the trio also appears under that name when they do live shows).
The various bands led by harmonica player and singer George "Mojo" Buford hark back to the classic Chicago blues sounds of the early '60s. Among harmonica players, Buford has the distinction of being the only musician to have played with various bands led by the late Muddy Waters in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, and '80s. (Waters died in April 1981.) Buford left Mississippi for Memphis in his teens and honed his chops around Memphis before heading to Chicago in 1952. He began playing with Waters in Chicago in the late '50s, but by 1962 Buford relocated to Minneapolis, where he recorded several obscure albums for the Vernon and Folk-Art labels. He rejoined Waters' band in 1967 for a full year and then toured with him again in the early '70s, after harmonica player Jerry Portnoy left to form the Legendary Blues Band…
In the sound of the Roman artists, fragments of classical music blend with field recordings of every kind, voices and found sounds are manipulated, sampled and remixed, converting them in new frames and timbres likely to evoke rest and silence typical of the extensive glacial vastnesses. 3 years after his first full length CD, Netherworld comes back with this new work titled "Over the Summit," in which enclosed memories, feelings, and past experiences, deeply lived during the years and surrounded by an almost deafening silence, can be heard and felt circling vast mountains’ snowy peaks.
The underlined aspect is the sensation of peacefulness or contemplation of an uncontaminated and silent nature, wrapped in the winter’s white blanket…