February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Between medleys, Martin spoke about his late father, P. Joe, as well as Paddy Canny, Joe Bane, Tommy Potts, John Naughton, Martin Rochford, Paddy O’Brien (Tipperary), Vincent Griffin, and Bill Malley. The conversational ease and reflection with which he mentioned each musician created an intimate atmosphere, as if we were all on a cuairt, dropping by for tunes and chat. Martin’s remarks were more personal and deeply felt than what he might say on stage, where a proscenium can become a waterless moat, and humor and insight blended effortlessly in a few of his off-the-cuff comments.
“There are two requirements for composing a tune,” he explained, indirectly referring to “Maghera Mountain,” his own composition that he played. “First, it should sound like every other tune. Second, it should sound unlike any other tune.”
He praised Joe Bane as a rustic, earthy fiddler whose relaxed style of playing largely eluded critical recognition but provided Martin with an example of music as self-contentment. He talked about the endless variety in interpreting tunes and giving them new settings, and how creativity can be force-fed by anxious moments of forgetting certain notes and producing your own to bridge the gaps. Tunes and anecdotes formed a pattern of something greater than each, and the best indication of Martin’s own comfort occurred when he ended a tune not long after starting it with this explanation: “I don’t want to play that.” He shifted right into a tune he did want to perform.
Martin began the house concert with “The Windswept Hill of Tulla,” a slow air he played on viola with feathery delicacy. Then, switching to fiddle, he launched into a rake of reels that his father recorded with Paddy Canny on their classic album from 1959.
On a tuned-down fiddle Martin performed the jig “Tell Her I Am,” and he followed that with a pairing of a Paddy O’Brien tune and a Liz Carroll tune, the latter evidently written with Martin in mind.
“The Whistler of Rosslea,” an Ed Reavy reel, was given an intense, close treatment, and two jigs associated with John Naughton sprang in full vigor from Martin’s bowing.
An inventive mix of long and short strokes — sometimes verging on feverishly minute sawing — deepened the mystique of Martin’s performance. His playing of “The Britches” was almost hypnotic, luxuriating in the notes without indulgence, while his interpretation of “The Graf Spey” cantered smoothly. “The Foxhunter’s” was an intended tour de force, played with speed, agility, uncanny dynamics, and flourishes bordering on sorcery. If it was calculated to get a rise from the audience, it succeeded magnificently.
Martin’s encore was in response to two requests from the audience: first, play something texturally and chordally searching or improvised, a la Keith Jarrett; second, play “Bill Malley’s Barndance.” Like Jarrett, Martin used anthologistic snatches from different modes and tunes to construct music never lingering long in any one melodic line. The effect was slightly dissonant, with several parts patched together like angular glass shards. It was an exploration in the moment, and the moments themselves were placed more side-by-side than on top of each other. The transition into “Bill Malley’s Barndance” elicited a chuckle of recognition from the audience, and a finishing reel brought the concert to a fittingly rousing conclusion.
Martin Hayes’s fiddling mastery needs no affirmation from me. It was readily evident all evening. Few Irish traditional fiddlers have his command of a room. But what elevated this solo house concert were his astute insight, lambent wit, and engaging recollections and stories. His description of scaring others in a house with a story about the faeries began from the premise of first scaring himself. Afterward, when his car wouldn’t start, no one in the house would venture out. A set of keys to another car was finally tossed to him. We all laughed, and it reminded me of an Irish adage: “Just because I don’t believe in faeries doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
A fiddler of keen intelligence and seemingly limitless skill who plays from his heart, Martin is endlessly curious about his own art. In an extended explanation of what he calls “the lonesome touch” on his 1997 album, he writes, “I have found that you can never possess it; you can only yield to it . . . For the most part it still remains the unobtainable horizon, the object of inspiration and motivation.” As this solo house concert in Connecticut demonstrated, no fiddler is closer to that unobtainable horizon than Martin Hayes.