Biography

Following the release of a cover of Kid Cudi’s massive hit, “Pursuit Of Happiness,” Tray Wellington is set to release “Moon In Motion 1,” an instrumental inspired by music and nature as entities that are in constant motion through time, like the moon around the Earth. In 2022, Wellington released his debut full-length album, Black Banjo, capturing the attention of tastemakers and his peers alike. He was on Spotify’s Grass Roots playlist cover, appeared on David Holt’s State Of Music series on PBS, earned coverage in publications such as The Bluegrass Situation, No Depression and Folk Alley, was interviewed by roots music authority Rhiannon Giddens for a BBC radio documentary and featured on W. Kamau Bell’s United Shades of America on CNN. “This is a record that breaks right through subgenre boundaries,” wrote Barry Mazor in a review of Black Banjo for the Wall Street Journal. “If bluegrass is about spotlighting virtuosos, here’s a new one people will be checking in on for some time to come.”
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Following last year’s album, Black Banjo, and this spring’s inspired cover of Kid Cudi’s massive hip-hop hit, “Pursuit of Happiness,” Tray Wellington returns with “Moon in Motion 1,” an original instrumental that solidifies his reputation as not just a masterful banjo player, but as a composer—and as the leader of a band capable of making their own contributions to a unique sound.

From its opening passage, which places guitar and banjo arpeggios over a sustained bowed bass and fiddle chord, “Moon in Motion 1” reveals itself in consecutive sections that offer kaleidoscopic transformations of several rich themes. Departing from the conventions of bluegrass and newgrass instrumentals, the tune lands instead in the realm of blended composition and spontaneous improvisation that characterizes a kind of roots chamber music pioneered by artists such as Punch Brothers and Hawktail, abruptly shifting moods while combining and recombining elements in a carefully composed sequence. And while every member of the group—Wellington, bassist Katelynn Bohn, Josiah Nelson (who doubles on mandolin and fiddle) and guitarist Nick Weitzenfeld—shares in successive focal points, the emphasis is always on interplay, not conventionally focused solos, with ever-present trades, unisons and full group textures offering endless variations on memorable scraps of melody and chord patterns.

“I often equate music and nature as one in one,” says Wellington, “as music is a constant movement that is always progressing forward through time. With this idea in mind, I thought one thing that always moves around us like music is the moon. I thought what a better way to progress in my music than channeling this idea of continuous movement.”


About Tray Wellington
Growing up in western North Carolina’s Ashe County, Trajan “Tray” Wellington heard a lot of music — and from the first time he heard the banjo as a young teen, he was, he says, “hooked.” Within a few years, he had joined with a few friends to form Cane Mill Road, an acclaimed band of youngsters whose wide-ranging brand of bluegrass quickly found favor with an equally wide-ranging audience. By the end of 2019, the quartet had released three well-received albums, recorded with bluegrass and Americana star Jim Lauderdale, and performed at festivals across the country, including Grey Fox, Merlefest and the IBMA’s Wide Open Bluegrass, culminating in a 2019 IBMA Momentum Band of the Year award — and, for Tray, individual recognition as an IBMA Momentum Instrumentalist of the Year.

With growing acclaim for his talent and a lengthening list of his own, individual accomplishments — including the release of his debut solo EP; leading workshops at Merlefest and Grey Fox; a coveted position as an assistant at banjo master Bela Fleck’s Blue Ridge Banjo Camp; a cover story interview in Banjo Newsletter; and an invitation to Mike Marshall’s prestigious Acoustic Music Seminar — Wellington decided to blaze his own musical and professional trail, showcasing with his Tray Wellington Band at the IBMA’s virtual World of Bluegrass in the fall of 2020. He returned the following year to host the IBMA’s Momentum Awards ceremony and perform on the organization’s Wide Open Bluegrass festival Main Stage. A recent graduate of East Tennessee State University, Tray currently makes his home in Raleigh, NC, where he works with Pinecone, the Piedmont Council of Traditional Music, when he’s not on the road. Comprised of its namesake, bassist Katelynn Bohn, mandolinist/fiddler Josiah Nelson and guitarist Nick Weitzenfeld, the Tray Wellington Band has already appeared at prestigious festivals and venues across the country, including the Pagosa Folk’n’Bluegrass festival, Wintergrass and Winter Wondergrass, with performances at others, such as the Strawberry Festival, Pickin’ In The Pines and Red Wing Roots on the books.