West Coast Cooler

So Seattle comes to Clare. But no, this isn't some bizarre encounter between grunge botanists and the Burren. Nor has Courtney Love been recently seen dashng off an Aeroflot jumbo jet to cadge some Cashel Blue at Shannon duty free. Instead this is a whole other sort of homecoming. Now resident in Seattle, Martin Hayes is returning to his native East Clare townland of Feakle for the launch of his second album, UNDER THE MOON.

Tonight, Clare will celebrate itself, Feakle's eastward of the Burren but it has its own reasons for local pride. Stroll past a rookery to the roadside cemetery and you'll see a plaque to the most famed man buried within its hallowed ground, the author of THE MIDNIGHT COURT, Brian Merriman.

But Feakle people also know their music matters. Martin Hayes definitely hasn't sprung from nowhere. Idling round the local hotel, Smyth's, I spy an East Clare tourist brochure, on its cover of photo of another master fiddler and founder-member of the Tulla Ciili Band, Martin's father, P.J.

So this homecoming reception makes sense. Martin Hayes may now reside far away in Seattle but his style is saturated by the music of the region which has a superficially casual but nonetheless subtle melodic elegance. And since UNDER THE MOON was recorded last December at Harmony Row studios in Ennis, there's an extra reason to locate the launch in Clare.

Besides, his return only adds to the palpable local pride in Smyth's. Feakle may have its reputation among the traditional cognoscenti but it's also off the more well-beaten tourist tracks that lead through the Burren, past the Cliffs of Moher and onward to the musical fastnesses of Doolin and Miltown Malbay. Tonight, Feakle's going to show that it also counts.

Martin Hayes' own personal situation isn't dissimilar. Just now he's between audiences, more fjted in America than in Ireland, hailed by specialist traditional fans but still comparatively unknown to those without that ghetto. UNDER THE MOON is intended to end that ignorance.

And so it should. Martin Hayes is long past the apprenticeship period and UNDER THE MOON presents a mature, fully-fledged musician who now knows how deftly he can weave his variations on the tunes within. UNDER THE MOON doesn't document the first tentative early spring shoots of his style. Instead, it's Martin Hayes in full resplendent bloom.

His arrival couldn't be more timely. Just now, traditional music has entered a period both of resurgence and the most peculiar promise. Indeed it's arguable that the mid-Nineties may be its most challenging time since that '70s phase when the Planxty, Bothy Band, Clannad and De Danann clans emerged.

The twin successes of the RIVERDANCE spectacular and the RIVER OF SOUND series could be a mere coincidence of fickle fashion or they could represent a shift in the national psyche. But one point is clear - they're definitely filling a gap, resulting from Irish rock's current phase of indie introspection.

Rock's both stopped heckling its audience and ceased to become an arena for useful Irish debate. Guitars may rage more violently but ambitions seems lesser and far more constrained. Both indie bands and the latest chic Italian restaurateurs are just catering for taste and only the style of consumerism is different. Rock's embarking on its latest catch-up with America and Britain, not setting its own Irish agenda.

It's also mislaid its linkage to tradition. This isn't some trivial academic complaint. From Van Morrison onwards, every artistically enduring Irish rock artist has dared cross that border to find fresh inspiration. For instance, don't ever tell me that the twin rainbow guitars of Thin Lizzy at their majestic peak weren't flavoured by those tunes.

So the fact that Siniad O'Connor introduced Paddy Maloney - or indeed, any piper - to guest on 'Raglan Road' at her recent Tivoli concert, has long ceased to be peculiar. Or to take the saddest note, the sight of Ronnie Drew carrying the coffin of Rory Gallagher should be powerful evidence that the relations between the elite of Irish rock and folk musicians have long been intimate not formally diplomatic. It really does go back and forth, as Martin Hayes is happy to testify.

But of course, this Clare fiddler is firmly rooted. He's played wild Celtic jazz-rock in Chicago bars - the band naturally bowed to local hero Brian Merriman and was christened Midnight Court - but next, his priority was to win his own informal musical master's degree in his own East Clare inheritance.

Indeed he was almost suckled on the music since besides his father, his uncle, Paddy Canny was a master fiddler. Standards were awesomely high around the Hayes household and it was almost inevitable that the teenage Martin was a regular All-Ireland champion at Comhaltas competitions.

But we're not talking flash, precocious Ciili-dazzling virtuosity. Hayes' feat is to communicate in the present without sacrificing the past. Somehow he's found his own Celtic and Clare blues that remains loyal to his elders yet quite easily co-exists alongside jazz.

So you'd expect him to be knowledgeable about his Clare seniors in the local tradition but not necessarily to be expert talking about John Coltrane, John McLaughlin or Keith Jarrett. So often with such manifestoes, it's easy to spot the artificial joins and the two cultures can seem flagrantly mismatched and Gaelic gets mistranslated into Esperanto. But not with Martin Hayes, and that's what's so fascinating.

He'll claim that his central task is always to seek the emotion in the tune. But he selectively strokes the melodies; he doesn't worry them into deconstruction or sprint along their surface. A dab at the rhythms here, a shift of the key or harmonies there and it can seem the traditional equivalent of the Fifties jazz maestros who so fastidiously filleted the classic Broadway show tunes.

Next day when we finally settle down beside a tape-recorder, Martin observes: "Probably the Irish thing is melody. Like I've heard musicians in America say that they look at Africa for rhythm and they'll say 'Ireland, that's a great little country for melody'.

"And it's true. Like there's enough going on in 'The Bucks Of Oranmore' to compose several symphonies We really are walking around with dense amounts of condensed melody."

The story does really start from before his birth. His father had been among the founders of the Tulla Ciili Band, more than a decade before Martin was conceived. For the area, it was the essential culture club and resource centre.

Yet in recent times, the Ciili Bands have had a debatable reputation. To younger ears, they can seem to represent an antique Celtic conformism from a past we should escape. Even that master renovator of traditional music, Sean O Riada feared they might strangle solo expression while their records haven't generally helped their cause.

But as someone who followed his father into the Tulla Ciili Band as only 13, Martin is a highly informed advocate on their behalf. First he explains the beginnings of the Tulla band and the social situation that musicians like his father faced in the less than roaring '40s:

"In the locality when my father grew up, there were about five or six musicians, about the 18, 19, 20 age group. They just played for house dances and himself and Paddy Canny would travel on bicycles with their fiddles strapped to their backs. And there was two other guys, Joe Bane and Bill Malley who played another little section of the locality. And Paddy Canny's dad was also a fiddler and they all lived within about two miles of each other.

"Then some years later, they met up with joe Cooley from Loughrea. And a big bunch of them got together to form a band. They'd normally played in twos or threes in houses; now it was seven or eight guys who could go off and play big halls. They used to absorb the outside influences of dance bands. Like they used to have little drum-kits or a piano or a stand-up bass. They even got saxophones now and then."

The way Martin tells it, ciili bands were almost the forerunners of Celtic rock. "They wore bow ties and jackets. It would be the same as if a trad band decided they were going to look grunge now."

In way, ciili bands like Tulla sustained pride in the local identity. "Yeah," he continues: "It's was like having a hurling team. And when they used to go to a Fleadh Ceol, large groups of people would turn up as supporters for the competitions."

Then they were the best, sometimes the only way to organise local music. Hostility to house parties isn't just some recently ailment. The church was often suspicious of sessions in country cottages. Best the music happened in the parochial halls where the courting couples could be monitored.

"The Church used to try to prohibit house parties. And so they manipulated and moved it into the parochial halls where they were i charge. And so there entered the necessity of the Ciili band. Because it wasn't just the matter of putting up a big PA. They didn't have big PAs. So it was a matter of gathering a number of people who could make a lot of noise and fill the size of the room."

Still, what about Sean O Riada's unease?

Martin's answer is balanced. O Riada "wasn't looking at it from a very musical point of view and he felt that the expression of the individual musician was entirely lost. Which, of course, it was. I think that there was also the belief that the Ciili bands would absorb the individual musician and never let him be expressive. But that didn't prove to be the case at all. Lots of musicians like Joe Cooley and Willie Clancy all played in the Tulla band. But of course, the truth was that you couldn't hear them individually in the bands."

They rarely got the opportunity to shine in the primitive recording environment of the time, a liability that has cemented outsiders' popular view of the ciili bands as monochrome metronomes.

He agrees that "there was no concept of how to record. Like, they would sit at home, rehearse what they did, go into the studio, play and then go home. Just two microphones set up and there was no mixing or control of the sound afterwards. It's done quite differently now; it was done then with quite a lot of innocence."

Solo and small sessions were never confronted with such problems. An archivist like Seamus Ennis would arrive from Radio Eireann or the BBC. Their bulky tape-recorder might seem an impossibly clumsy instrument today yet it could still capture the innate character of musicians in informal sessions.

And yet they set new social standards as the first home traditional semi-professional musicians of the century. Not of course that they could afford to neglect home, hearth and harvest.

"They didn't think much of a musician who disregarded his work or his farm," says Martin. "Or his religion or his church. You could have all the music you wanted as long as you didn't neglect those things."

Then they got to travel. Let's not forget that today, it's far easier and quicker for Martin to fly from Feakle to New York than it was for his father in the '40s to travel to Dublin.

"They started winning these All-Ireland fleadhs. They ended up playing in New York at Carnegie Hall, sharing a bill with Pat Boone. Then there was the big emigrant thing to England in the '50s and they'd play for thousands of people."

Perhaps the Tulla Ciili Band and their peers really were the first Mean Fiddlers in London!

But not for the first mean blues guitarists. This interview was conducted a week before Rory Gallagher's death. Neither of us knew of his endangered condition yet Martin Hayes - unprompted by me - mentioned Gallagher as a significant emotional influence in his late teenage days.

I'd been quizzing him about his early knowledge of rock and Martin had confessed to general ignorance before he reached 17. Caught up in the culture of traditional music, he says he "felt there was a bit of a threat from them. In a sense almost that this culture is about to swamp my lovely little dream. Those people are diminishing the crowds at the ciilis.

"Then I thought they must be listening to something here. There's something I'm not getting. So I decided on a very practical level to put myself on a diet of rock'n'roll. And Rory Gallagher was somebody about whom I thought that maybe if I could get what he was doing here, then maybe I'll understand it. So he was fairly intense and it was his intensity that eventually hit me and then I started thinking - can you imagine if Irish music had this kind of intensity?"

Later we're talking about John McLoughlin and jazz and he invoked Gallagher again, recalling that "Rory Gallagher gave me a sense that there's a way of gathering your strength and your energy together to put a lot of yourself out there. Like there was an inspiration. I just thought he was so uninhibited and so free in his playing. That would have inspired me to open up a little bit."

He'd been winning All-Ireland championships but there were other careers to consider so he'd gone to college in Limerick, then to Chicago where the musical bug really struck again and permanently so.

He claims there was no masterplan: "I really turned to being a professional musician out of necessity. I was in Chicago as an illegal alien and I ended up as a gopher on a construction site for an Irish company. And I did not like it."

It was '84 when recession was blighting Ireland and Martin made a pragmatic decision.

"After driving nails and carrying lumber for about six to eight months, I said to myself that playing 'The Black Velvet Band' and whatever toorooo nonsense I could come up with and went into the lounge bars and made a lot more money than I did carrying lumber."

He'd linked with the strong Chicago traditional scene that included such an esteemed fiddler as Liz Carroll but he also explored other areas. "I was outside hanging out with all these Celtic rock'n'roll kids and hanging out in rock and blues clubs and playing in corny nightclubs and cabaret clubs, places where traditional musicians in Chicago had never been bothered to go.

"I just wasn't aware of their structure. I just came in and looked for the first place with a shamrock hanging over it and I said I'll play here, I don't want to carry any more lumber."

So Midnight Court were formed and lasted three years. But he says he eventually "moved out of that area because there was a lot of subtlety and other kinds of expressiveness in solo music that was beginning to eat at me. I wanted to be able to speak in other ways and I couldn't do it in the electric environment because there's areas of subtlety in slide notes, tones and textures that were completely eliminated. And it was just grating at me The band had the kind of the form of a sledgehammer and sometimes I wanted to tread very, very lightly."

Soon after, Green Linnet signed him and released his debut solo album, MARTIN HAYES.

That got him really motoring all over the States, and beyond the confines of Irish-America for as he says, "I'm in an American kind of acoustic alternative folk scene, an arts-centre scene. There's a lot of environmentally aware, back to the land kind of people They're the kind of audience who'll maybe go to see Ali Akbar Khan and then come to my gig."

He'd also left Chicago and decamped to Seattle. The obvious temptation, the obvious question - how did an ecumenical Irish fiddler like Martin Hayes experience grunge and the death of Kurt Cobain?

He was home in SEattle on the night Cobain perished and is careful to insist that "I don't want to sound like I was jumping o the bandwagon afterwards but I suddenly realised the significance of it all. Actually everything that he represented was manifested in his death - the actual doom, the depression, the anxiety. I hate to say that it was like a final act that summed up the whole career but in a way, he spoke and still speaks for a generation in which there's a lot of confusion and disillusionment.

"It's hard to see how grunge came about in Seattle because it has such a lovely sheen of happiness. That's the funny thing about grunge because where everything seems alright, it's not. And they see a hopelessness which they're giving voice to."

He returned to Clare to record UNDER THE MOON. He reasoned that since collaborators like his father and Steve Cooney were here in IReland, "somebody has to fly somewhere". Recording in the Ennis Harmony Row studio was both cheaper and more congenial without making any technical sacrifices.

Like many artists, he's uneasy commenting about his most recent album. He concedes that I'm not alone in suggesting it sounds more relaxed than his debut but then says he lacks objectivity. Besides, he's already pondering his future. He even admits that "there are several conflicts emerging.

"Obviously I want to progress but does that mean that I'm on the progressive wing of Irish music or not? And what does that mean? And is that the destructive side of Irish or not? And yet, of course I need to grow p so I'm trying to find that narrow gap that allows me to pass through, that doesn't destroy everything. So it's very subtle, trying to find the right balance to keep progressing."

But this dilemma isn't some artistic puzzle peculiar to Martin Hayes. It also involves the music's relationship to that wider Irish audience that hasn't been tutored in its secrets. Is crossing-over an injurious cop-out as some conservatives might insist? Or does traditional music lose by resisting popularisation that compromises with modern fashions? And can it often seem an exclusion zone that intimidates even sympathetic outsiders?

Martin will accept that "it tends to be a little bit exclusive. One of the reasons that it seems exclusive or is seen that way is that for many years there was a feeling inside Irish music that it wasn't understood or accepted outside so it felt threatened from the outside so it put up this shield.

"So there's a kind of a nod and a wink brotherhood which says we're all part of this inner sanctum and we all know what's going on in here. So it's not an unreal sensation for somebody to experience that about Irish music.

"It's changing a lot. Sharon Shannon is very accessible for all people. A thing about Irish music was that it didn't have a tradition of being a performance music. The performance aspect always seemed quite confusing and dull to a lot of people. It didn't seem to convey and translate in a way that was meaningful. So unless you were part of the little clique that sat in the corner and enjoyed it at a very intimate level, you were excluded."

But then crossover can cause its own cliches and stereotypes?

"Those stereotypes actually exist. And the musicians are quite well aware of them too. I've heard musicians say that well, we're going to do a few tunes but we really need to throw something in here to mix it up. And it's all based on the idea that you don't really feel what it is that you're doing is really good enough at all. And in my opinion, it is."

Martin Hayes is on a roll.

"Like," he continues, "there's a feeling that if you need to express something powerful in Irish music, you need a drum and a bass. If you want to experience something very imaginative and spacey, you need a synthesiser. Or you need to bring in influences like a string quarter to give it class.

"In my opinion, those things aren't true. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with them but they're not necessary."

I throw in a jazz analogy. But Martin concludes with a classical music comparison when I suggest relations between traditional music's teasing with melody and Miles Davis reinterpreting Richard Rogers' tunes in the '50s.

"In jazz," he says, "you would have ended up making an art-form out of improvisation as you tinker with the melody and move further and more dangerously away from it. In Irish music, it's not so easy to go that far since the whole core of it is the melody. So your improvisation must be very relevant to the melody so you're inside it and just barely flopping outside of it but never losing its direction. Your improvisation is more like what they would have been talking about in early baroque music where a certain amount of improvisation was written into the music and since has been written out.

"But then again if you improvise and don't know the melody really well, what it's trying to say and the mood of it and things like that which are all kind of intangibles, your improvisation often shoots off in strange directions without that knowledge."

But don't believe that tunes or their interpretations are immutable, enslaved by the laws of some Victorian or De Valeran rulebook. Martin Hayes' musical philosophy is far more supple.

"I hear a tune and I'm going 'I think I hear that a different way'. I think that maybe there was a point missed in it. For example, I might hear tunes on an album and they might be full of fire and drive and I might think that something might work as a very plaintive tune. Or 'I wonder if that tune were in B Flat, how would it work?"

Technical stuff, but this is the superstructure that scaffolds the abundant emotion in his music. The latest resurgence in Irish music has created a new agenda of problems and potentials but it's also unveiled a new generation of champions. And Martin Hayes is indisputably among the leaders of that vanguard.

Let's close with Martin musing about the new regime and the new audience.

"I don't know if the word hip makes any sense but all of a sudden, it's reached a critical mass which allows it to be hip and which means that there's a certain pride of identity that goes along with it. It's hip and it's us so that's fine.