Last Friday, I told my Spanish teacher – who is from Argentina – that I was interviewing the master fiddle player Martin Hayes that afternoon.
She mentioned it to her South Armagh-born husband who in turn sent me a message about Hayes’s long-time musical companion, Dennis Cahill, who died on 20 June this year.
It read: “Can you tell Martin that I feel the loss of Dennis Cahill. The live album with him in Seattle was instrumental in me deciding to become an art therapist, working with trauma repair in this wee corner of Ireland.”
I thought it was a beautiful sentiment and passed it on to Martin Hayes when we spoke, he at home in Madrid and I in Belfast. I asked him if he often got such messages.
“That’s wonderful,” he replied. “You do get messages like that sometimes. In fact, yesterday I was in contact with a woman from Belfast who has terminal cancer whom I met some months ago.
“It was a tune I played and she wanted to hear it again so I recorded it for her and sent it off, along with a few other tunes.
“It's one thing to get people to go to concerts and to have some level of success but those moments when some people explain how the music touches them, it has so much more depth and meaning, the whole thing makes you feel like you're doing something much more useful than than simply entertaining. That’s lovely to hear.”
As well as being a close friend, Cahill also brought something new to the music that Hayes wanted to play, something that could only come from someone who wasn’t already steeped in Irish music.
In an interview with the Irish Times, Hayes said that “the clarity that someone from outside the tradition can bring is enormous".
I ask him what he meant by that.
“Well, we come out of a tradition and we make assumptions about things,” he explains.
“We don't question them and we assume that this is the way to play. But a lot of our understanding is often mixed up with identity and nostalgia, so I can listen to a recording from 1975 and think it was amazing because I have this nostalgic sense of how I experienced it when I first heard it, and I could play the record to Dennis and he would say, ‘Yeah, it’s nice but...’ because he hadn't the nostalgic experience that I had so we're not totally objective about the music we play all the time and we can't be really, I suppose.”
However, it’s hard to imagine that people will be dismissive of Hayes’s music in 50 years' time, be it his solo albums, duets, or the later work with The Gloaming.
The live performance of The Opening Set at Queen’s University will never fade from my memory with Hayes seeming to go into a trance as the crescendo built up.
Hayes continues to move forward, always on the search for moments of musical perfection, although as he recognised above, that perfection is transient, subject to revision and to re-evaluation in the future but worth striving for nevertheless.
The latest vehicle to musical Valhalla is the Common Ground Ensemble who are coming to Belfast later this month as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival.
For Hayes, Common Ground was like choosing from a bucket list of musicians to share his exploration of uncharted musical territories.
“Yeah, it's a bit like a bucket list in a way,” he agrees.
“I had played with Cormac McCarthy, the pianist, as part of a big band jazz concert at the School of Music in Cork some years ago. And I remember thinking, ‘He's really good, really smart and knows exactly what he's doing'.
“And over the years, at the Kilkenny Arts Festival for example, several times I found myself sitting on the stage watching Kate Ellis.
"She’s a kind of chameleon almost, able to adapt to any kind of situation and I wanted to do more with Kate.
“Also, I had done things in New York with the guitarist Kyle Sanna. Kyle had arranged four or five tracks of an album I did with a group called Brooklyn Rider. So you his arranging skills.
“And Jimmy Higgins will actually be coming to the festival with us this year.
“I’d also been watching Jimmy Higgins for years and had been dying to play with him.” And thus the Martin Hayes and Common Ground Ensemble came into being.
When his flowing locks first appeared on my Zoom screen, I said I was glad to be speaking to both of him, Martin Hayes the fiddler and Martin Hayes the author, as the Co Clare man has just published his autobiography, a must-read for anyone interested in traditional music.
Shared Notes started out as a book about traditional music but, as you can’t talk about trad without describing its social setting, it has become as much the story of one man’s passion for the music but also a tale of family and place, of cultural belonging and setting off on the road less travelled.
“My original idea was to write about music and I really thought I would write about my ideas about music,” says Martin. “But I found it difficult to kind of figure out how to do that other than going through a kind of biographical process. Just telling my own life story, because the life story seemed to explain what I was doing musically.”
It’s hard to imagine but Martin Hayes was quite the raker in his younger years - not quite Keith Moon levels of madness but booze played a large part in his life when businesses he had started began to fail.
“Yeah, well, I had a few wild years for sure,” he admits.
“I have strong opinions that I don't always express. But now, I'm rebellious in a quiet way, I’m rebellious in the music choices I make because I quite clear about the things I want to do and about the qualities that I think are important in the music."
He adds, with as intriguing an advert for a concert as you could wish for: "I'm deeply interested in just playing tunes, just enjoying them, that never goes away. But I'm also interested in the other end of the spectrum of other possibilities that we haven't thought about."
:: Martin Hayes and the Common Ground Ensemble will be playing at the Grand Opera House on Tuesday October 25 at 7.30pm.
Shared Notes, his autobiography, is published by Transworld Ireland.
