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Full Details and Tickets at: https://sfmsfolk.org/concerts/TrayWellington.htmlThe Susquehanna Folk 2024-25 Season comes brings its first stop to one of our favorite venues, Zoetropolis Cinema Stillhouse in Lancaster, with one of the most innovative names in contemporary banjo playing!
Banjo player Tray Wellington’s approach to the quintessential American instrument is all about looking forward. An International Bluegrass Music Association Award winner, Wellington is critically acclaimed not only for his technical prowess, but also for leveraging his unique point of view to craft a one-of-a-kind voice on the instrument.
Wellington combines forward-looking musical textures and influences with an athletic and trad right hand. There are numerous qualities here evoking so many five-string banjo legends, but there are just as many that are brand new — referencing or conjuring jazz, swing, bebop, hip-hop, rock & roll, and beyond. The stereotypical, often revisionist and white-washed cultural touchpoints of the instrument are decidedly in his rearview mirror.
With roots in Western North Carolina and East Tennessee, Wellington subverts those expectations and presuppositions of five-string banjo players artfully; his playing is constantly informed by a striking self awareness. Do not be confused, his bluegrass, old-time, and traditional expertise is well-honed, since he was a teenager, but at this stage in his solo career, they are merely a small handful of influences in the rich, diverse soil his music is rooted in. On top of this well of knowledge, Wellington knows how he is perceived in these roots music spaces, and he uses that awareness to his advantage.
Tray Wellington Band sets often include entrancing covers — like a show-stopping rendition of Kid Cudi’s “Pursuit of Happiness” — and plenty of bluegrass, Americana, and country, but the bulk of material is original with a focus on composition and improvisation.
While Wellington and his band are a common sight at bluegrass festivals, this is a bluegrass ensemble in structure only: yet another banjo expectation that he slyly reconfigures. It’s clear Wellington never feels hemmed in by his instrument, his background, or the vocabularies available to him from each. That freedom is more than attractive to audiences and listeners, it’s electric. When the band steps on stage, the audience sees a “bluegrass band,” but by the time they leave the stage, those audiences are shown a group and a sound that is anything but.
At the end of the day, at the end of the concert, at the end of the tour, Tray Wellington synthesizes countless styles and inputs to craft an approach to the banjo where reinvention and innovation aren’t abstract concepts, but active, real time processes. Banjo players like Wellington are adept at sitting on fences, living in multiple, dissonant worlds simultaneously.
This Concert is made possible with generous support from the Stabler Foundation
Official Site: https://traywellington.com/
INFO: https://sfmsfolk.org/concerts/TrayWellington.html
DOORS: 6:30 pm
CONCERT: 7:30 pm
Ticket Prices:
$24 General Admission
$20 SFMS Members
$10 Students
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Zoetropolis Cinema Stillhouse, 112 N. Water Street,Lancaster, Pennsylvania, United States
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