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.

Tray Wellington accomplishes this type of duality with ease, even for his youth, demonstrating that if you treat the banjo as an instrument that transcends styles, techniques, and genres it will rise to that occasion and then some. And, he shows us all that there’s an entire undiscovered world of banjo out there waiting for us. With a guide like Wellington, that world is no longer hard to find.