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Music Review Rolling in reverie, but a plea for muscle

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Earle Hitchner

MARTIN HAYES and DENNIS CAHILL. At Joe’s Pub, Greenwich Village, NYC. April 7.

This small, high-ceilinged concert venue is relatively new to the Public Theater, founded by the late Joseph Papp (hence the name). It offers an intimacy ideal for the style of fiddling by East Clare’s Martin Hayes: graceful, contemplative, trancelike.

The musical journey Hayes takes his audience on is a near hypnotic combination of sensual and spiritual. His long medleys often start slowly, luxuriantly, then pick up in pace oh-so-delicately, building in passion and gaining in tension until a final, fevered burst of hard bowing.

In guitarist/mandolinist Dennis Cahill, Hayes has a minimalist-style accompanist who allows ample — and perhaps too much — space to fill on fiddle. When the duet works, as it often does, it creates a communal, cathartic experience that ends in an exhilarating epiphany. When it doesn’t work, it comes off as precious in feeling or somnolent in effect, and the dream-like playing can, through the predictable pattern it follows, induce daydreaming.

Hayes is an admirer of Keith Jarrett and John Coltrane, and his exploration of different textures in Irish traditional tunes sometimes calls to mind the serenity and soulfulness heard in "The Köln Concert" or "A Love Supreme." Certainly, his fiddling on the song melody of "A Stór Mo Chroí" beautifully distilled its haunting nature, and his ability to string multiple tunes into a new, cohesive whole may be unmatched in Irish music today, something he achieved during an encore that included "The Bucks of Oranmore," "Rakish Paddy," and "The Humours of Tulla."

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A charismatic player, Hayes owns a technique few can equal, but his approach at times betrays a calculated spontaneity, a studied transcendence, a whiff of emotional manipulation. Also, the tendency of Cahill to plink his guitar or mandolin chords as if they were mere accents or rhythmic garnishes can prompt an unsettling question: why bother? Subtle is one thing; evanescent, another. He has the talent to do far more, as he showed on the reel "Tommy Coen’s."

Together, Hayes and Cahill have fashioned a signature sound and style, and they deserve the praise they’ve received for taking a more thoughtful, less frenetic tack toward tune interpretation. But now there’s an air of familiarity hovering over their sets, and a little more muscle and a little less musing might help to dispel it.

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