23
Feb
2009

8:18 am

“Little Tinge of Melancholy”: An Interview with Martin Hayes

• filed under Music

On March 9 fiddler Martin Hayes and Guitarist Dennis Cahill will play at Joe’s Pub, touring behind their most recent album Welcome Here Again.  Their music is Irish, and traditional, but it is beyond genre.  The New York Times aptly called their playing “a Celtic complement to Steve Reich’s quartets or Miles Davis’ ‘Sketches of Spain.’”  Their work is deep, soulful, and transporting.  I caught up with Hayes a few days ago.

Howard:  So I figured I would start with your new album which I thought was one of the best albums of last year.  It was a great album.  Do you see it as a departure from your previous work or more a piece?

Martin:  Well it was something of a struggle in the sense that I started it years ago and there were a number of interruptions that happened for one reason or another that we needn’t go into. But, I didn’t get it completed. I liked the first few tracks we had recorded and I liked the mood. I gauge everything on mood and feeling for the most part. I had the hardest time getting everything up to that level. I operate with a kind of a gut response to the feeling of things. I’m incredibly cruel with pieces of music. I just chop them down, and start them over.  I might have put a lot of work into tracks and then I still chuck them out. I had a certain kind of mood and feeling that I wanted to retain throughout the album. Each tune was my attempt to achieve it. In the end I just looked at all the pieces to see whether they actually hung together in some way or other, and they did.  As it turns out, you could put the tracks anywhere on the album and it wouldn’t make any difference. 

Howard:  That’s right, to me it had sort of a little bit of a melancholy feeling, in a very beautiful way, and maybe a little slower than some of your earlier work.

Martin:  I have a habit of recording at night. I have my own studio, so things get pretty quiet and I tend to start working at that time. When I get that close to the music late at night I always see it in a delicate and melancholic kind of way. I think the music inherently has a full range of capabilities.  I mean it can be wild and fiery and it can be joyful and flippant, but that little tinge of melancholy seems to draw me in.

 

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The Wind Swept Hill of Tulla

 

Howard:  Now didn’t you go off for a little while and play rock music?

Martin:  Yeah I did. It was a good experience but it really made me want to come back to this more subtle music. I mean the thing about the rock n roll band that I was in, it was louder than God.  It was the loudest thing, you know. I remember playing at a club in Chicago, and there were complaints from the neighbors about the volume, and this was a club that played a lot of heavy metal. It was a lot of fun, you know. The excitement of a good drummer and bass player and electric instruments and amps on stage – that’s a very powerful feeling.  And acoustic musicians don’t necessarily get to experience that, so it was nice to at least, maybe nice isn’t a good word to describe it but, it was useful, it was fun.

Howard:  What instrument did you play in the band?

Martin:  Well I had an electric five string fiddle but to tell you the truth I never knew what to do with the extra string. It was just there. In the end it was a band that never went anywhere and just played clubs in Chicago, and didn’t really have much of a following either. So, after a few years we fizzled out.

Howard:  You know you’ve been with Dennis Cahill as a duo for so long, how does that work in terms of composition?  Do you compose together or is most of the, most of the work yours and he comes in later on in the process?

Martin:  Well I’m probably the initiator. I bring a lot of the melodies and ideas, maybe initially and then we start shaping it out together. I have rough ideas of what I want, and Dennis starts shaping, adding things and changing things. It’s a consultation over the whole thing. You’re often waiting for moments of lucky accidents. And you’re hoping that you’re alert enough to recognize them as well. Gradually the melodies take a shape we like, it’s a collaborative process. The tunes grow over a period of time — even while we’re performing. And then they reach a point where they’re not growing anymore. There might be another bit of life left but pretty soon they have to be retired.

Howard:  Right.

Martin:  But they kind of have a little trajectory, a little life cycle in each piece .

Howard:  There’s such a tremendous sympatico between the two of you in terms of your playing, which you know is always remarked on in the reviews of the albums and the shows, and it’s so true.  Is that something that you had developed instantly or did that take a while to develop? Is it still developing?  Was that like snapping your fingers or did it take a little while?

Martin:  No, that took a while and it’s still developing. We spend a lot of time talking about music and what we’re trying to achieve with it. There are two things we do after we get off a plane and into a car: we discuss music and then we discuss politics.  But anyway, we talk about music a lot.

Howard:  Sounds like what I talk about with my friends.

Martin:  That’s what I talk about.  Music and politics all the time. We are always trying to decipher the musical process. For any musician there are moments when things happen. A feeling begins on stage, and we may start playing in a way that is beyond the technical and mundane. Suddenly you have extra ideas and you also feel you have the extra time to implement them. So that’s a kind of a place in the performance of music that you’re always trying to get to.  And so, any musicians who can get in there will have something equivalent to a telepathic connection when that happens. It’s a bit like sports. Michael Jordan always knew where the ball was going to be somehow. Music is the same way.  You read the intentions of the musician that you’re with, and you can feel that it’s heading in a certain direction, when you’re really tuned in.  So, a lot of what we do or try to do is to kind of just be there, as present as possible, in the moment. And so a lot of the work really is about getting into that space.  It’s not about a tune, or the playing even. When you get in there, you don’t mind playing the simplest things in the world, or you can play complicated things.  It doesn’t make any difference.

Howard: It’s quite remarkable to see you two live.  I mean it’s almost like telepathy.  The way that the two of you are in sync.

Martin:  We’re trying anyway. There are good nights and bad nights. You can’t lock it down too tight.  You want to be feeling it, observing it and responding.

Howard:  How much does the set vary from night to night? You know so many songs and you play so frequently, how often does the set list change?

Martin:  Every night is different, even if you didn’t intend it to be. Each gig takes on its own life and you had better respond to it and try not to play last night’s gig even if last night’s gig was great.  So that’s the first thing I’ve learned over the years.  We may have one set at the beginning of the tour and it ends up being different at the end of the tour.  It’s a slow evolving thing. I take out things and put in things.  Okay, so that’s one method of change that happens.  The other level is that each tune itself has the possibility to change. For example, how fast I play it, how many times I play it, whether I come up with new variations or improvisations on it. That’s something that happens also. The other thing that happens is that we actually will have little sections in the show that are free improv where we take away the safety net for a little while. It helps us be more present. You just have to rely on mood and feeling to get you through these segments. So we use these little techniques to help get us where we need to be. 

Howard:  You play in a lot of different kinds of venues, at festivals where there are thousands of people, in clubs where there are dozens. Is there a certain kind of venue that you enjoy playing in more than another? Is it more fun to play for fewer people or more people?  Does it not matter? 

Martin:  It kind of doesn’t matter. It would only matter if you kept doing one kind of venue the whole time. Then you would lose something because each environment creates a different atmosphere. A club is different from a theater.  We’re doing a number of club gigs now like Joe’s Pub and the Iron Horse and the World Café Live in Philadelphia, that kind of thing.  We played a small village hall on an island off British Columbia recently, before that we played the Sydney Opera House. In a good club like in Joe’s Pub, there’s a kind of energy in the room. It’s kind of tight and contained, and the music is up close and just right there.

Howard:  Do you notice a difference, comparing a crowd in Ireland and an audience in the States?  My assumption, maybe it’s wrong, but my assumption is that an audience in Ireland would be more familiar with the music from the get go.  Is there a difference in playing to an audience that may be more familiar with the music, and grew up with the music, as opposed to one that hasn’t?

Martin:  Well probably there’s a little bit of a difference, but I don’t change what I play for the audience, whether they’re in New York or whether they’re in County Clare, where I grew up. I’ve always thought that enjoyment of the music shouldn’t be dependent on any inherent knowledge of it. It shouldn’t become dependent on having an academic, intellectual knowledge of the piece of music. You can get lost in the whole minutiae of it. You can start chasing down these rabbit holes explaining, understanding, comparing and analyzing.  And very often you lose the whole point of it.  My intention with the music we play is that it should be understandable to anybody without us having to compromise it.  I don’t want to water it down. I have found that, in fact, contrary to watering it down, the less I compromise, the more accessible it becomes. People nowadays are listening to all kinds of things. People are listening to Middle Eastern music, they’re listening to avant garde, modern classical music, they’re listening to Indy Rock and so forth.  People’s ears are so much more open now than they were a number of years ago.  One doesn’t have to water it down, change it or alter it or make it into something more accessible. Because I think people are ready to hear things as they actually are at this point.

 

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Paddy Fahy’s Reel

 

Howard:  That’s a great segue: how much are you influenced by all of those things that you’re hearing and how do all those influences find expression in the music?

Martin:  The way they work for me is that the more I can comprehend, listen to, respond to, and feel other forms of music, the more I meet musicians from other genres, the more I interact with them and talk with them, and play with them, the more I learn and the better and more precisely I can understand the music I’m playing and where it fits in the world. It helps me interpret what I’m doing to make it speak to a wider world. It’s not so much that I would grab something from another music genre and attach it to the thing I’m doing. I don’t really do that. In fact there’s very little of that going on. It’s more, like listening to, let’s say, Jordi Savall.  There is such attention to detail in his bowing. The absolute tiniest minutiae of sound are given the fullest attention. That immediately had an impact on me. It made me want to investigate my own minutiae and detail. Listening to Arvo Part gives you a sense of the power of that can be achieved with the minimum of complication. The impact of Miles Davis holding a slightly flattened note can create a powerful tension. All these kind of ideas have influenced me.

Howard:  Right.

Martin:  Many of the ideas that I embrace from other forms of music aren’t necessarily ideas that I grew up with, but I try to use ideas that do not conflict with the integrity of the tradition but rather add to it.

Howard:  And this is music that you grew up with at the earliest possible age, right?

Martin:  Yeah it is.  I’ll tell you it’s a little bit of a sociological study in a way because I grew up first almost only hearing this music. So that by the time I was ten, for example, the only music I wanted to hear was traditional Irish music. It really says that whatever you’re exposed to, whatever it is that’s piped at you, that’s what you’re going to be into.  So by the time I was fifteen I was trying to figure out this rock n’ roll thing.  I didn’t understand what it was about at all. That sounds weird, but I kind of didn’t get it. I actually had to work at it a bit, pursue it somewhat to get the whole point.

Howard:  You actually recorded an album with your dad, right?

Martin:  I did. I’d been living over here for a while and he fell ill.  This was many years ago. When he recovered we realized we had never recorded together.  We spent three hours at a friend’s home with a porto studio or something like that, and recorded these tracks, so that we would just have them. It was only released locally as a cassette. My dad and I added a few more tracks to it some years later on with Dennis on guitar. It’s the bones of an album which needs to get released at some point.

Howard:  A couple of years ago I actually made some inquiries to some of the record stores in Ireland to see if it was available. I can tell you that it is not commonly available.

Martin:  How on earth did you get into this music?

Howard:  You know, it’s funny.  It’s nice of you to ask that.  No one in my family is a musician, but my grandparents have an eastern European Jewish background and they had these old klezmer albums when I was growing up.  And I started, you know, listening to old time Klezmer and then there was a  Klezmer revival that I started listening to when I was in high school – the Klezmatics and Andy Statman and people like that.  And from that hearing the Irish music, the traditional music, it sounds similar enough to me, or sounded similar enough to me that I could begin to appreciate it.  And –

Martin:  The Klezmer and the Ceili bands have a lot in common. 

Howard:  And so I got into your music because it seemed familiar, and then you listen some more, and begin to appreciate it on its own terms, outside of genre.

 

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The Clare Reel

 

Now there was a long, long gap between this record and the last one; any plans to record again soon?

Martin:  Well I’m going to try and keep moving forward here.  Let’s hope it doesn’t take as long next time. The lesson for me is that when you start something, you should keep going until you finish it.

Howard:  Two more questions and then I’ll let you go.  Any sort of plans to either record or play with a larger group or in a larger group setting?

Martin:  Yeah, I have a number of things coming up.  I’m getting together with a string quartet from Brooklyn called Brooklyn Rider.  Do you know those guys?

Howard:  No.

Martin:  They work with the Silk Road Project so they’re used to playing with musicians from different ethnic backgrounds. We’re trying to do something in the next couple of weeks.  And then there’s another friend of mine, Thomas Bartlett — he plays with people like The Frames, Yoko Ono, David Byrne and Antony and the Johnsons, people like that. We’re going to do some jamming sometime later on in the year and maybe record it. I’m planning to do an album with Frankie Gavin. Are you familiar with Frankie Gavin?

Howard:  Yeah, yeah.

Martin:  Just a traditional fiddle duet album with two fiddles and a piano. Straight up, nothing fancy.

Howard:  How did your concert with Bill Frisell go?

 

 

Martin:  Oh that was the best one of all. That was so much fun from the beginning to end. I really loved it. I’d like to do some more again. He is just a treat to be on stage with, to be around.  We spent three days in a house in West Clare, jamming and then we went on this Irish tour. We played the material differently each time. We didn’t even know where the end of these pieces were. Bill is just so tasteful, he’s kind of beyond genre. He can’t be categorized. I could do it again — that’s for sure.

Howard:  Maybe soon, that’d be great if some recordings come out, were to surface someday. 

Martin:  I think it was recorded, but I don’t know what has become of it.

Howard:  One final question, you know, if somebody comes to the site and they see the interview and they listen to some of the tracks that are up there and they say, you know I want to listen to more of this great music, what would you recommend?

Martin:  Well there’s an album by this fiddle player, Tommy Potts. The thing with him is that it’s a bit like recommending John Coltrane. The first listen through you may not get it, you may not even get it after ten listens. But by God when you get it, you will know it. There’s only one album of his, its called The Liffey Banks. It’s still for me the defining album of how the fiddle can be played in Irish music. The recording is so sincere and emotionally present from beginning to end. It’s just solo, unaccompanied fiddle. The recordings of the pipers Willie Clancy  and Seamus Ennis are very important. There’s another album too which I like a lot, which is Tony MacMahon and Noel Hill – In Knocknagree. Have you ever heard of that one?

Howard:  No.

Martin:  It’s just a recording of concertina, accordion and set dancers, dancing in a pub in Kerry. It captures something - there’s a wildness and energy to it that I think you’d love..

 

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Rileanna — The Humours of Castlefin; Noel Hill and Tony MacMahon

 

Martin:  And one more.  A singer by the name of Darach O Cathain, he has one recording on Shanachie records, and if you had that and Tommy Potts, and Knocknagree, I think those three albums would give you a solid foundation.

Howard:  Right.  Thanks so much – I appreciate your time.

Martin:  Alright, thanks very much.

Howard:  Okay, bye-bye.

 

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