THE POSITIVE TOUCH

THE FIDDLE has always possessed that fugitive spirit, that slippery ability to capture the heart in one breath, yet bludgeon it with cold reality in the next. Stiphane Grappelli revels in soaring its crests, Seamus Maguire relishes its troughs, Frankie Gavin swings sylph-like between the extremes of elation and sorrow, and Sean Keane tiptoes across a bridge that straddles optimism and despair with all the dexterity of a tightrope walker.
But Martin Hayes merges with his fiddle like nobody else these days. It s as if the player and the tune have emerged from the same chrysalis at one and the same time. Telling the singer from the song has never been so tricky. Hayes not only plays the tunes, he becomes the tunes. And they become him, in one seamless hairbreadth of a moment.
This is traditional music with a small t . Traditional in that it cossets and cajoles roots music into the fresh air, head held high, proud of its history, and even prouder of its distinct personality.
As such, The Lonesome Touch is the ultimate coming-out party, and Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill are the quintessential house guests, persuasive yet unpolished, graciously insistent on making their presence felt without once hogging centre stage when the company gets colourful.
With just three albums under his belt, Hayes has already tapped out a formidable number of tunes some 70, all told. Is he ever afraid that he ll one day run out of worthwhile tunes to siphon from the vaults, that the well might run dry?
I don t think that it will, he replies. I m not even actively searching for tunes at all. I m just playing whatever ones pop into my mind, but tunes come unbidden, over all the years of playing. There are so many tunes circulating in my head, and only so many of them stay there at any given time, so that when they come round again, you play them differently. I don t feel there s a shortage of them anyway. Paddy O Brien, a friend of mine in Minneapolis, figures he has 3,000 tunes. Now that s a lot of albums!
Hayes genetic lineage is no small contributor to his vast stockpile of tunes, his father, P. Joe Hayes being one of the founding members and driving forces behind those hardy quintegenarians, The Tulla Ciili Band. And although Seattle is where he calls home Feakle still exerts its magnetic forces to draw Hayes back to base with more frequency than many migrants manage when they ve nothing more lengthy than the N7 to negotiate. And seeing as how The Lonesome Touch can be traced to east Clare, it seems only right and fitting that Hot Press should shimmy on down to imbibe the same air that has fuelled his passion for the music.
Crossing the bridge into Ballina, steering a path north-west through Killaloe, skirting Lough Derg, through Scariff, and before you can say Smile we re in Feakle, a village with a highly-developed orthodontic sensibility. And if streetscapes were enamelled, Main St. Feakle would be a dentist s wet dream. Swathes of colour tumble from hanging baskets undented, house fronts boast a happy and frequent acquaintance with emulsion, and footpaths wend their way towards all manner of fine establishments. It s here that Merriman decided to finally lay himself down, only after he d wrought one helluvan erotic masterpiece in Czirt an Mhean Omche ( The Midnight Court ).
On further, there s the strangely-titled Pepper s Pub, sounding more like a Lake District moorhouse for tired barge trippers than a cradle of all things traditional, from Paddy Fahy s reels to The Bucks Of Oranmore and The Kerfunken Jig. It was here that the Tulla Ciilm Band rang in their 6th decade and it s here that half of Feakle meld with the music on most Saturday nights, and every Wednesday without fail.
Smyth s Hotel plays host to our visit, wringing us dry of the remains of our drenched journey down. Mercifully, they share with us an abiding concern for the belly and the soul in that order, and food miraculously appears before our eyes.
And so we sup of the water, break of the bread and generally get misty-eyed as we philosophise about the whys and wherefores of Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill s music.
The Lonesome Touch bears witness to an inspired musical coupling with Dennis Cahill lending his not inconsiderable twist to the Hayes tale(s). Cahill, a Chicago native with a past history that s encompassed everything from r n r, might on the face of it seem like an unlikely candidate for the job, but one look and listen and you re captured. Obviously his birth certificate bears little relationship to his musical lineage.
The question as to whether he has any difficulty writing in the traditional idiom is rendered well nigh redundant by his sheer virtuosity with the six-string:
The fact is that I don t try to write in a traditional idiom, Cahill smiles. That s how I get around the problem. I m still learning tunes and finding out about their inner structure, this circular composition thing that you find in Irish music, which is very difficult to write in. I m still struggling with that so I don t think I ve written a reel, or a jig, or a hornpipe that I think is up to scratch compared to the really good ones but if it happens, it happens, you know.
Cahill has two tunes on the album, the reel, Jimmy On The Moor and Peggy s Waltz , neither having a blind bit of trouble keeping up with the reputation set by their more aged companions.
The soldering of their relationship is something which neither is too clear on, but Hayes attempts to get a fix on its genesis.
I m all emotional and wooshy and non-specific about the music, he suggests, whereas Dennis is incredibly diligent and detailed about how it all physically works. I m a bit philosophical and continually wrapped up in that side of it so we have to bring those two sides together in the music. I waffle on about a feel and Dennis tells me about a voice movement in the chords! So as long as he can understand what I m vaguely trying to express and I m beginning to speak his language too, we re moving in the right direction!
As for the nuts and bolts of the tunes themselves, Martin Hayes is anxious to explain their genesis, whatever corral they might occupy, be they reel, jig or hornpipe.
I ll tell you, he suggests, to compose a good reel requires just about as much inspiration as it does to come up with the main theme for Beethoven s 9th Symphony. In reality, there s very little difference between the two. Irish music has just an enormous wealth of melodic ideas, which were never even written down.
Hayes maintains that it is our collective memory for tunes that accounts for the rich tapestry which is now at the beck and call of anyone with the remotest interest in chasing a tune or baiting a reel.
What happens is that you have a melodic idea, which a hundred years ago would have moved from Feakle as far as Tulla as far as Ennis as far as Miltown and the only thing carrying it was memory, which to a large degree was imagination and fantasy. So the tune evolved continually in the hands of people, and one person s inspired moment was carried and re-shaped and continually moulded. So the music travelled not only geographically, but it also travelled down through time as well, so that by the time they end up here you have these finished pieces of music that aren t attributable to any one person. They re part of a huge process that s not at all simple, you know.
Tunes weren t blindly accepted by players, either. The question of personal taste had much to do with the evolutionary process too.
First of all, people learn tunes that they like, Hayes continues, so there s a vetting process there. Then they work with them and there s an acceptance of ideas and a rejection of ideas so that there s a continual mass adjudication of the piece of music. And by the time it gets to your hands it s already been so well scoped and sculptured that you have very complete pieces of music.
Given the dynamics of Irish traditional music, and its allergy to stagnation, have Hayes and Cahill ever worried that their critically acclaimed recordings may be taken as the definitive versions the mother of all versions, so to speak with a resulting dampening of the spirit that such a halt would suggest?
That problem started when Francis O Neill and other musicians started documenting the music, Hayes explains. People would take a snapshot in time and define the tradition as existent there and then, with any deviation from that seen as somehow breaking links with the tradition. People have a hard time coming to terms with that, but I don t feel so regimentally tied to any one version of a tune when I play.
But I see the tradition as not necessarily just the handing on of tunes, but the process of playing, of getting inside it. When you find that lonesome touch , as it were, it s as though you can t make a mistake anyway. It s as if the music s going to evolve along its most natural lines anyway. If a guitar player feels the blues, it s not so much how he actually plays the notes, but how much he feels and how much integrity the playing has. If the feel is right you could hardly say it was wrong. Music goes immediately to the heart of things, and bypasses language, in the same way that abstract art does. Straight to the point.
And apparently a sizeable proportion of Galwegians feel the same. They come in their droves, tickets clutched tightly to their bosoms for the Hayes/Cahill party, and all bar none, greet every set of tunes with a rapturous reception. Hayes natural bonhomie draws even the stragglers into the fulcrum of the music.
Tell Her I Am seeps into their bones, a collective cure for osteoporosis and cheap at twice the price. The Lament For Limerick finds fervent support, aided no doubt by Hayes pithy observation that, like Yeats, he too has an abiding sense of tragedy which sustains him through temporary periods of joy. Anyone with a memory of the Castle Ciilm Band finds their heartstrings tweaked by the sublime see-sawing of Paddy Fahy s Reel and as for Bruach Na Carraige Baine , well, Seamus Begley had better hold on tight, because Hayes and Cahill are in danger of totally commandeering that Begley classic if they carry on caressing it in the manner they do tonight.
Remarkably, audience reactions have been a hair s breadth apart the length and breadth of the two hemispheres, according to Hayes.
Not an iota of difference can I find between audiences in Alaska, Sydney, Clare, France and Scotland, he remarks. The consistency is startling. People seem to hear it the same way the world over. But if you go deep enough inside yourself you have no choice but to be universal.
This music, if it s any good, shouldn t be just the domain of people who are already familiar with it, and who have educated themselves in it, he insists. It should be completely understandable to anyone who wants to open themselves to music.
Artistic integrity, and the supposed conflict between continuity and change, are issues that Martin Hayes is adamant he addresses through The Lonesome Touch. Instead of conflict, though, he sees these so-called polar opposites as two pieces of the same puzzle, complimentary and contiguous, thriving in a symbiotic relationship that owes nothing to antagonism.
It s easy to jump from one thing to the next and to reject where you were, he explains. I like to move on without a process of rejecting. For me it was important to be able to hold The Tulla Ciilm Band right here in my hand, and at the same time completely immerse myself in Miles Davis and Beethoven and Bach, and resolve whatever conflict I felt was there so that I could embrace these things without having to reject anything.
If I m listening to Coltrane or Miles Davis, and at the same time I m listening to Tommy Potts or Willie Clancy, I have no intention of ever rejecting where they came from, or of excluding them from my understanding of the music. Anything I embrace has to fit in with everything else. So in my mind, innovation and change aren t things that you can just plaster on and keep moving on recklessly ahead, and expect it to be meaningful. It moves at a far slower pace than some people would like, probably, and it requires a great deal more soul searching than finding exotic records from South America and ripping off their ideas. It sounds very marketable but you can only do it if you re willing to ignore the philosophical implications.
That said, Hayes is no stranger to innovation and change. The fact is, that if only the IDA would cotton on to his modus operandi, they could tack a handful of their business expansion schemes to his coat-tails and ride on for a whole lot longer than some of the flashiest of multinationals.
I don t have any objection to innovation, he insists. I think change and growth is a necessary part of the music, but I think the opportunities for it are narrower and more difficult to achieve than people would like to believe. Change that s consistent, and not going to sound stupid in 15 or 20 years time, is a lot harder to attain.
The preciousness that s been known to attach itself to Irish music is something which Hayes rejects outright.
People talk about the Irish famine being in Irish music, he notes, but there s been famines all over the world, and our Irish experience isn t so completely isolated as to make us so completely unique and different that our cultural music cannot be understood except through the knowledge of our experience. That s just not true.
The triumph of the universal over the parochial is something Hayes and Cahill both relish, having notched up more air, sea and road miles over the past few years, backpacking the music to every nook and cranny of the globe that s grandiose enough to have a route in and out.
There s no way that we could have done an album like The Lonesome Touch even four years ago, Dennis Cahill avers. It took an enormous amount of work over the past few years, with us playing live, picking notes and emotions that worked and didn t work. It took an enormous amount of patience.
It demands a lot of you as a person, like, Hayes adds, to withdraw from fear of failure, to withdraw from the need to be seen as this or that or the other. Even though in the end, you end up receiving a lot of accolades anyway, but it s on behalf of the music! When you re really playing some tune like The Skylark well, it s The Skylark that gets the acclaim!
It s no longer a display of virtuosity, Cahill interjects. It just comes down to the tune that you re holding up in the air and everybody says: Look how cool this tune is! . I remember a friend of mine went to see a jazz guitarist in Chicago and I asked Well, how was he? and he said: His fingers worked great , meaning He s got a lot of chops but there s not a lot of music coming out of there . That, to me, would be disastrous.
Virtuosity isn t the key then, despite the stripped down sound that foregrounds fiddle and guitar with minimal embellishments to cover the cracks.
Among Irish fiddlers I m certainly not the most virtuous, Hayes modestly proclaims. I never have been, and in my earlier years my penchant for getting into the dramocht of music was almost a convenient side-step for my own lack of technical skill at the time! But my technical skill has come along, as much as my head can conceive of things, that s how much my ability has risen.
But still, if you put a Bach piece in front of me you might have to wait another 20 years before I could deliver on that. I don t have the technical facility to do a load of other things.
That used to make me feel insecure and incompetent, but I don t anymore. I had Mark O Connor records, and it seemed like he could play every genre of music a million times better than I could play one of them, but then virtuous playing seemed to be too much of an egotistical attempt on my own part so I left it alone.
Irish music doesn t lend itself to incredible dynamics and virtuosity, Hayes continues. The music isn t about that at all. It s about something a good degree more humble, and deeper, at a more soulful level. Because the best of the tunes are incredibly simple, and display no seeming technical genius at all. But you try writing one as good and you soon find out that you ll be forced to your very depths to come up with anything equalling it.
Ultimately it was their voices that Hayes and Cahill both sought, and it was this that dictated the level of technical skill, and not vice versa.
Eventually, says Hayes, I began to turn in to myself and to ask myself do I have something to say that s meaningful? And if I do, how will I say it? . So I just resorted to, what for me was a given, an absolute truth in the music.
If there s one thing that riles Hayes (more than a man kickin his mule), it s the widely held belief that we must forever be condemned to define and redefine our national identity through our music.
The country still works towards its identity. It s not an established fact entirely, he suggests. People still hail U2 and Riverdance as somehow a further measure of our confidence and identity. That it never really stops. That somehow we haven t quite finished completing the picture of our identity.
But surely that s true of any healthy national identity? That it is in a constant state of evolution?
Not necessarily, Hayes avers. I think the French are absolutely certain of their identity, for example. Probably countries and nationalities identify with very different thingS. The British measured themselves largely on the effect they had on the world outside themselves, which is a bit of a crisis for them right now. But the Irish have an identity crisis, too. I think we sometimes enjoy the persecution complex. We thrive on being downtrodden and overcoming it, like. That gets old and withered too, though!
A couple of night later, the West left behind, Hayes and Cahill lope on-stage at the Temple Bar Music Centre and all hell breaks loose. There are enough whoops and hollers to suggest the presence of a congregation of hard-core Baptists scattered through the auditorium.
If Bringing It All Back Home was about stretching racial memory to embrace past, present and future, searching for the seams that link the musics of immigration with the music of home, then The Lonesome Touch is about the seamlessness of past, present and future. It s a wink-and-elbow language of delight that revels in the principle of less equalling more . And ultimately, it s melody and rhythm that tweaks the very core of our musical history and present-story.
Hayes and Cahill are wary of succumbing to the deification that seems inherent in the release of such a critically successful album. Hayes, in particular, allows a wry smile to creep across his face.
I m reminded of a Chinese proverb that stuck in my mind. It says that in all success is inherent decline. Obviously if you re on the way up you must be prepared to go back down too, you know. There s no doubt about it, and I try to prepare myself for it. I suppose the one thing I do is to try not to attach myself too much to the success of it, because if I did I d probably turn on all the musical tricks.
I ve watched so many artists struggle to succeed, and use up their best and greatest effort getting to the top. Then the world catches up with them just as they re on their way down and they make money and sell albums galore just as they re on their way out creatively. I think that s a very frightening thing. I like to look at people like Grappelli and Miles Davis who continue to grow and evolve, but they do it at enormous personal expense. They literally burn themselves out. You end up being very hard on yourself.
The bare bones that epitomise The Lonesome Touch didn t emerge from under the flesh without some serious hard labour, certainly.
It takes every bit of effort I have to just hold the tune up on its own, Hayes reveals, as if my technique was invisible. If you want to trade just on how you play I think you d be on very mushy ground, whereas it s great to be able to say Here s the music instead! n