Irish trad virtuoso Martin Hayes talks about his newest project, The Martin Hayes Quartet

Having been given financial support and patronage from the University of Limerick, Martin Hayes – founding member of the hugely popularly Irish-American supergroup The Gloaming, and possibly Ireland’s most accomplished trad musician – found occasion to crystallise some of the unique ideas he’d had for a long time. Working with his longstanding partner Dennis Cahill, and with distinguished musicians Liz Knowles and Doug Wieselmann, The Martin Hayes Quartet was founded and fostered in the spacious environs of Bantry House, Co. Cork.

It was there that the quartet’s album, The Blue Room, was recorded. It’s a record which is tied as much to Martin’s memories of performing in ceili bands as a teenager in Clare, as it is to the remote, coastal setting of the house itself. This a collaborative album, imbued with originality because of the unique input of everyone involved.

“I didn’t set out to be a composer when it came to this album,” says Hayes, speaking from the West Coast of the United States, where he’s been performing with The Gloaming ahead of a brief European tour – including a homecoming performance at the National Concert Hall – at the end of October. “I wanted this to be a collaborative process. The other option for us was to compose a reel and really get into the minutiae of writing multiple parts – and of course that usually involves the input of one person. But if there’s numerous people who can imagine the parts that make sense to them, and they all contribute to getting a dialogue going, then it starts to make more sense.

“If you’ve picked the right people, then you have a multiplicity of ideas, and the pieces you play take on new forms and interesting textures. “Part of the excitement is not knowing where you’re going to end up. It’s an old habit of mine – in the repetitive process of playing melodies – not to know how many times I’ve played a piece. And not really knowing when I’ll be finished. So it creates a bit of uncertainty every time you play a tune. Ideas begin to coalesce and they recur each time you play.”

Hayes’ new album comes as the musician gets set for a significant residency at the National Concert Hall this month, which will extend into 2018. While Hayes’s place in the Irish trad canon is assured, does he feel that the genere is sufficiently esteemed in contemporary Ireland? “I do think that it has been embraced in our national psyche,” he opines, “in a way that few other folk musics have in other countries, at least in the western world. Having said that, we haven’t always viewed Irish music as a multi-dimensional art form. We haven’t always embraced the emotional complexity of it and how expressive it can be.”

Hayes speaks passionately about the “beautiful subtlety and profound commonsense” of Irish music. He claims that despite being carried by the “peasant population” of the country throughout the centuries, it is music that would certainly be pleasing to the finest composers in the world. Indeed, the genre was embraced throughout the world, becoming what Hayes terms a “universal music language”. He sees this as being a product of the songs themselves, rather than from any limited ideas of Irish identity or nationalism.

“There has been a tendency to merge this music to a nationalistic movement,” he considers. “But of course, musicians themselves always resist that, because when one is playing, it’s not for nationalist reasons. They do it because they love it. So ultimately, it’s important to look at Irish music initially as music. We should play it with consideration for how these melodies make us feel, and how other people respond. That should go above the fact that it’s Irish.”

It’s not inconceivable that an artist of Hayes’s calibre might be asked to represent Ireland at The White House on St. Patrick’s Day. Is that a request that he’d welcome?

“No…no,” he says wearily. “I just don’t think I’d enjoy being there. I do not support Donald Trump, so there wouldn’t be any honour whatsoever. I did get to play for Obama at one stage. I liked him, but it’s… Ah, I mean I have political views, and I’m not an extreme left or right person – I like seeing things head down the middle. I believe there’s two sides to every story, and there’s certainly more ways than one for us to govern ourselves, so I’m not absolutist one way or another. But I do find Trump kind of destructive.”

Would it be fair to say that Martin would prefer to separate music from patriotism entirely?

“I don’t have any mission to do that,” he replies. “When I say I’m not wrapped up in any cultural or nationalistic way of viewing things, it’s really that I’ve isolated what I do as music first and foremost. And it’s music that I, as an Irish man, or someone else from any other country, could be proud of for the very quality of it.

“At the same time, the key to this music is to experience the deep heart and expression that led people to create it in the first place. I cannot disconnect it from its history, nor would I want to. When I sit down to play and put the fiddle under my chin, my goal isn’t to become an emblem of a national art form, but rather to sink into the music and try to experience that deep connection to where it originated.”

Does it bother Martin that the art form he finds so engaging isn’t as widely broadcast as it could be on radio and television?

“I’d say there’s more than enough,” he responds. “In some cases, I remember for years, there was all this crying out for hearing more traditional music on air. But nowadays, we’re all free to listen to whatever we want; we all have iTunes, Spotify, streaming services. That’s a positive development in my eyes. Young people are happy to listen to different things, there’s no homogeny in music. I think that’s a very positive thing, because there are no prejudices or assumptions made about particular types of music. One teenager listens to this, another listens to something else. That’s great.”

Having done so much to broaden the way people see Irish music, did Hayes have to face down many detractors along the way?

“There would always be detractors,” he chuckles. “It would be impossible that everybody would like what you do. Generally though, I don’t trawl the internet to find out what people are saying about me, nor do I want to know. Even compliments roll off me. I don’t look for validation at that level. I like to think of other people being profoundly affected by the moment when the music is heard live.”

So no trad purists shouting “Judas!” at his concerts, a la Bob Dylan?

“Ha! No, I’m not trying to reshape the world here. I just have a sense and vision of the music that is maybe not universally accepted or adopted. That’s fine in my eyes. One of the nice things about the music is that there’s freedom in there for people to understand it in their own very personal way.”

There’s an early memory that Hayes is often asked to conjure up whenever he’s doing interviews like this. It’s one from his adolescent days, when he began playing in ceili bands throughout the south-west. In describing his latest project, he refers explicitly to the formative influence of playing simply for the joy of making other people dance.

He says that the Quartet is “a distillation of the rhythms I came to know during my adolescent years, playing for the set dancers of County Clare. They responded to music in an exuberant way that really showed me what rhythm is. I always try to play as though I am freely dancing and singing at the same time.”
The Blue Room is out now.