Martin Hayes: Interview Transcript
Episode link Podcast and Video
Martin Hayes:
When you're recording, you can start to think, "Okay, they will be listening to this," and you start creating for that other occasion, for that moment when the other will listen. It sometimes pulls you out of the moment itself, the moment of making music, that moment of surrender, of freedom, that freedom from error. Well, I should say not freedom from error, but freedom from the fear of errors and freedom from the burden of perfection. I think it's the rare musician who can stay completely in that spot and at the same time have real freedom. The moment is more important, I think than the musical perfection and the feeling of music, of course, is fundamentally what it's about, if you can capture that. But sometimes in the studio, you may have captured and you might be in such a state of mind that you don't actually know if you captured it.
Leah Roseman:
Hi. You're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. Martin Hayes is an internationally renowned Irish fiddler, beloved for his expressive playing and his collaborations with many great musicians in different genres, including Bill Frisell, Sting, Paul Simon, and more recently, Yo-Yo Ma with the Silk Road Project. During this episode, we speak of his wonderful book, Shared Notes, and he plays some beautiful music live. You can always use the timestamps if you're curious to jump to some music right away, but I encourage you to listen through the whole episode.
Martin speaks eloquently about life, culture, friendship, identity, and staying true to what you value and I hope this episode will thrill lovers of Irish music and bring new listeners to many of Martin's projects, including the Common Ground Ensemble, The Gloaming, and many more. We talk about the loss and legacy of Dennis Cahill, how he met Thomas Bartlett, the rich depth of traditional music that Martin learned from the older generation, and the rhythm of life growing up on the farm in County Clare. Like all my episodes, this is available as both a video and a podcast on your favorite podcast platform and the transcript is also linked in the description to my website, leahroseman.com.
Hi, Martin Hayes. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Martin Hayes:
Hi, Leah. Leah, great to be here. Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
I found out about you, actually, because of your book, your memoir, Shared Notes, which is such a beautifully written memoir, and I think it's one of my favorite books about music because it's so hard to write about music, isn't it?
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, it is. In fact, that ended up being kind of a memoir as being the only vehicle by which I could actually write about it. It's not so easy to write just directly about music, but it turns out that maybe using the memoir model kind of gave me an opportunity, at least a good opportunity to describe the whole background as setting to where I came in contact with music, how it all became part of my life, or, well, it was always part of my life, really I suppose.
Leah Roseman:
Should we maybe start with your dad? Maybe that'd be a good place to start?
Martin Hayes:
Yeah. Well, his name was PJ, PJ Hayes. Funny, but in his own neighborhood, he was known as PJo, Patrick Joseph, lot of Patrick Josephs in Ireland. Anyway, he learned the fiddle when I think he was probably 13 or something like that before he started at all. And somebody had lent him a fiddle or his family, and he took it up and tried it. And then he went to his neighbor, Paddy Canny, who was a couple of years older than him. And so Paddy showed him a few things, and Paddy's dad, who was a local music teacher, also showed him things. So he kind of grew up learning with Paddy and playing with Paddy Canny. And the two of them, they became kind of this kind of fiddling duet that would go here, there, and everywhere, and they would play for local house dances.
And then after a number of years, they found themselves in a Ceili band, the Tulla Ceili Band, which was a local Ceili band in County Clare at the time, back in 1946, I think that's when that started. So then they began to travel further afield, and there were competitions back then for Ceili bands and whatnot, and the Kilkenny started happening in Ireland some years later as well. And so the Tulla Band was a big name in that kind of world. And my uncle, Paddy Canny was quite a renowned fiddle player at the time. And somewhere around 1959, then there was a lot of things, I'm leaping decades in rapid succession here, but they recorded an album along with their friend Peter O'Loughlin on flute. He was just on one side of the album, and another friend of theirs, Bryt Lafferty, a piano player who accompanied them on both sides of the album.
Anyway, so that was early in the years of LPs. It's reputedly the first long playing record of traditional music kind of recorded and produced in Ireland at the time. Before that, it was all '78, but there had been LPs of traditional music obviously made in America, I think before that. But anyway, and it was kind of a recording that a lot of people from Kevin Burke to Frankie Gavin, many other fiddle players would cited it as being an influential record in their kind of music background. And it was actually ended up being a kind of an influential record for myself, even though I know both Paddy Canny he and my father. I still listened to the record and learned the tunes from the record as it turns out. But anyway, that's my father, and he was a farmer and a part-time musician, so that was the most all traditional musicians up to that point were all either farmers or carpenters, like Tommy Potts was a fireman. So there were various different professions, but almost nobody had a profession playing this music. So that was an unusual thing.
Leah Roseman:
And when you played as a Tulla Ceili band when you were older, I mean, you had to get home to milk the cows.
Martin Hayes:
Yes. Yeah, Saturday night was always a busy night. We were always playing on Saturday nights, and we might be playing up in Sligo or down in Carey from Richmond County Clare. In those times, it was more of a journey because the roads were small and narrow all the way, so we could get back at five o'clock in the morning. And on Sunday mornings, the milk collection for the creamery was earlier than normal, so that everybody in the country would go to mass, some mass, the obligatory mass that everybody went to. So we'd come home from the Ceili and on occasions we just switched into work clothes and went out and milk the cows without ever going to bed. And then we would go from there to mass and whatnot, and then we'd try and get a few hours sleep in the afternoon, and sometimes we'd be headed out the door again that Sunday evening to play somewhere else. It was quite common.
Leah Roseman:
And the way your dad taught you was just tunes from the beginning, just played a few notes.
Martin Hayes:
That's correct, yeah. That was basically all that anybody did really. They would just teach you tunes. And I mean, I didn't have other teachers, but from what I know of how it was passed on, it was very much, you can see it, you can hear it, copy it, do what I'm doing, and see how it works out. So in many ways, I think one of the interesting things about that is obviously it's not a very sophisticated learning model, but it does have a few things that are important about it. Straight off you, you're put in the position of being responsible.
There's no magic bullets. There's no solution that anybody has make this immediately easier for you. So you have to navigate your way around the instrument yourself, and you have to learn about tone and intonation, and you have to learn about the use of the bow and how you're going to do that. So I think one of the things we see from that is that among Irish fiddlers, it's the enormous variety of approaches and the difference in sounds like the difference between Liz Carroll and Frankie Gavin and Kevin Burke, and you name them, as if they're playing different instruments almost, the way in which they sound so different from each other. And I think that's probably one of the most fascinating things about this music is how distinctive and unique each musician ultimately is allowed to be in particular with the fiddle.
Leah Roseman:
It's such an intricately melodic music. And I was thinking about, you seem to have a fabulous memory for the details of your life. I was really struck, and I encourage people to read your book. I mean, just even the whole part about going to the one room school and all the details of your childhood, it's cinematic, you bring it to life beautifully. Do you think growing up that way and learning tunes that way influenced the way you remembered your childhood and your life with all these details?
Martin Hayes:
No, I don't think so because to begin with, I don't have a particularly good memory, actually as it turns out now. It might look different when you read the book, you think how - because most people think they can't remember the details of their lives and I think that's largely due to the fact that we don't visit them very often. And the other thing is that, well, it was something in my case, and I'm sure it might be the case for many others, is that we summarize parts of our life.
So I can tell you, I went to school in a one room schoolhouse and there was no running water, and we walked to school and blah, blah. And I've told you the whole story. Now, of course, the story is much bigger than that and when I write it's pulling on a thread. I suddenly, "Okay, my God. Okay." So once you start to investigate the story, so what I told you first was my heading. And we basically put our memories in boxes and we put a heading on it and a label, and there it is.But we do actually remember a lot more, at least I was surprised myself at how much I actually remembered.
But the other thing is, I also was aware that in the first 10 years of my life from '62 to '72, that I was looking at a very old world in those early years, like a world where the farming was done with horse-drawn equipment, where there was a big open hearth fire in the kitchen, so it was a lifestyle not greatly changed from medieval times almost. And then modernity. And in the book there's that moment when Neil Armstrong walks on the moon, and we in Ireland are aware of this, and we have grainy black and white televisions now, and we see a man landing on the moon. I knew that the rest of my life was going to be in some kind of modernity and maybe at that moment I didn't know that.
But as the years went on, I realized even while I was an older teenager, I realized that I had witnessed something that was a way of life would be unknown in very rapid time to all generations just immediately after me. And so I felt like it was important to remember this and to take stock of it and not forget, almost in the same way that I felt about the music also, which was to take stock of what was around me locally, what music was making... The richness of that musical life that surrounded me as a child. It felt like an important thing to hold onto, to preserve, to understand. Now I'm a real adventurer in music, but I'm still at heart also a bit of a preservationist and a traditionalist in some respects, I suppose. Okay.
Leah Roseman:
Would you like to share too now, take a little music break, and chat some more, or would you like to play later?
Martin Hayes:
Why not? I'll grab my fiddle here, while we're at it. (music)
Leah Roseman:
Thank you so much. I just had the joy of hearing you play that twice because you made a little mic adjustment and of course it was different.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
This beautiful subtle things.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, yeah. Well, one of the things, yeah, it's different every time I play, and so that's great in some ways. But then if I actually want to play the same thing, I just can't, that's the other problem, lack of consistency, but it's kind of... And I actually felt like I was cutting fairly close to the line there anyway, but it's a kind of music, I suppose, whether there's a certain amount of latitude-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Martin Hayes:
... inbuilt.
Leah Roseman:
So the feel of the dance, the fact that you grew up playing with dancers really influenced you.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, yeah. I men, the largest function that I saw that the music had when I was younger was that it was there for the dancer. And now people seem to have difficulty with the facts sometimes that it can have many different functions, of course, it doesn't have to be one function, it doesn't have to be just for dancers. So there was also a kind of tradition of listening music, if we could call it that. I suppose solo pipes and fiddle players like Tommy Pots and even Paddy Canny, I suppose. And people like Junior Crehan and Martin Rochford, and a lot of the musicians that I really liked were these kind of individual performers of the music. And their music was music that you set and sometimes just closed your eyes and absorbed the experience of what they were relaying. And the other reality was a much more outward and alive kind of interaction with things.
So one of the things that was in my mind growing up was to bridge the gap to bring some of the vitality of the dance to the listening music and bring some of the lyricism of the listening music into the dance as it were. And oddly enough, my father was quite a rhythmic player and really would go in search of the pulse and the groove of the music. And my uncle Paddy Canny, though they had grown up learning and played together was almost the opposite. He was almost entirely lyrical in his approach, like you could hear a narrative almost in his expression of melody. And it was all until he was full of dynamics and whatnot, and it was not actually suitable for the dance at all. But when the two of them played together, it was as if they were supplying each other with the missing part in each other's playing. So they kind of made a blueprint that I thought, "Could one person actually try to do this?" That was kind of part of my mission growing up. Would it be possible for me to take those two things and make them be a thing?
Leah Roseman:
Well, you certainly achieved that.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I could show you a little bit of what I mean by that. We'll say in the playing of reels in particular, you could have. (music)
So it could be like that. So it might be lyrical. (music) So it could be (music)
So what I ended up doing was bringing both of those things along. So I might end up playing like this. (music)
So there's a bit of lyricism and a little bit of rhythm and groove in there. And honestly, I don't even know what the tune is. I didn't know what I was going to play. So that just comes out just like wherever my fingers land, I suppose, whatever the first three notes are that the first three notes are something. So you end up playing it, but that was it.
Leah Roseman:
Do you always remember the names of tunes? I was curious about that.
Martin Hayes:
No, I could be playing a tune and going, "What on earth is that? What is that tune I'm playing." And I don't even know where I got it or what it is or anything? I'm not sure what that tune is called now that I just played. A certain amount of melodies, of course I have. And if they regularly pop up in my performances, in my concerts and my gigs. Of course, I have the name ready at hand, but there's another strata below that of melodies, just a big, big wash of them. And any of them could pop into awareness, unnamed, just like that. Just like the one I played there which is not a normal tune for me to play anywhere, but there you go.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I'm an independent podcaster who does all the many jobs required to produce the series, and there are a lot of costs I bear as well. Please consider either buying me a virtual coffee as a tip or becoming a monthly supporter, starting at $3 Canadian, which is close to $2 US or two euros, and getting access to unique perks. The link is in the description. Now, back to the episode.
There's something you wrote about recording, which really resonated with me. And you wrote, "The idea that we make music for another time can pull us away from making music for that very moment itself. The studio can be a horrible place." And you were referring, I think, to your first recording experiences and some of the older, traditional musicians.
Martin Hayes:
Yes. When you're recording, you can start to think, "Okay, they will be listening to this." And you start creating for that other occasion, for that moment when the other will listen. And it sometimes pulls you out of the moment itself, the moment of making music, that moment of surrender, of freedom, that freedom from error. Well, I should say not freedom from error, but freedom from the fear of errors and freedom from the burden of perfection. Because trying to not make any mistake and play perfectly in the studio will push you out of the zone easily I think. So I think it's the rare musician who can stay completely in that spot and at the same time have real freedom. So the moment is more important, I think, than the musical perfection. And the feeling of music, of course, is fundamentally what it's about. So if you can capture that, but sometimes in the studio, you may have captured and you might be in such a state of mind that you don't actually know if you captured it, because we can start hearing a squawk on the fiddle and not hearing the music anymore.
Leah Roseman:
Just this morning I was listening to something, the Boyne Water from your group, The Common Ground Ensemble.
Martin Hayes:
All right, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful. And this ensemble, this recording you made was the beginning of lockdown, right?
Martin Hayes:
Yeah. What happened was we had two concerts at the National Concert Hall in Dublin ready to go, and we were just meeting two days ahead. And we were just ready to go and everything stopped. Of course, the concerts were all canceled and everything, so we didn't talk for... Well, what happened immediately after that was in the two days following that, or three days, I said, "Look, we're all here. Why don't we go into the studio and record what we got?" And we did.
Now what you actually heard on this new recording isn't actually those recording sessions because what we managed to capture on that occasion was basically everything we'd been working on, all of the pieces that we'd put together. We kind of at least recorded them in some fashion, close enough to the arrangements we ended up with.
But last spring and summer was the first time the band actually got to play in front of anybody. And so we did a few concerts and the band members just kind of lobbied me and said, "Is there any chance we could go back into the studio now that we've actually played a concert and we've actually had the live experience?" Everyone said, "We really know what we should be playing now." And I go, "All right, we'll go back in." But the arrangements didn't change enormously, but we tightened up a lot of things and we felt a lot more comfortable about it in the end.
Leah Roseman:
So we'll talk some more about your many wonderful groups over the years, but this is a special, fairly new group. If you could speak to what you're doing with it.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, it's kind of the latest thing for me to do. Every year I work with the Kilkenny Arts Festival, which is a beautiful arts festival in Ireland every year. And I kind of helped curate one section of that that has for many years involved me kind of creating a finale concert of all kinds of musicians and all kinds of things. So I've gotten into this idea of, with short notice and little prep time, of pulling musicians together and creating bands and stuff like that. So I've done that at the Kilkenny Arts Festival. I do it at the Irish Arts Center in New York. I do it as part of a festival that I curate in Bantry at the Masters of Tradition. And so I've been doing a lot of this over the years and I've gotten to work with lots and lots of different musicians. And so this band is kind of like me saying, okay, imagine what would I do if I had a little bit of time and I could just pull another collection of musicians together. So this is what it is. It's kind of like my house band.
And it was also maybe the first time that I kind of ventured into choosing chords. I wouldn't claim responsibility for all the chording on the album, but the main harmonic thrust of the album, I would say that I had a hand in that and just sat around here with a little midi keyboard and stuff like that, making arrangements and stuff that I shared with musicians. Now, the intention was never that they would play exactly what I had done, but that I would give them enough material to work with and enough material to develop and to evolve from and that I would begin a conversation on many different levels around the piece of music and that they would have the freedom to bring their creativity to that and develop it into something much more refined and beautiful than I would've created myself. So that's kind of how the band works in a way, and that's what it is.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. And do you have big tours planned with them?
Martin Hayes:
Well, I think next October we will be doing a good number of Irish dates and some UK dates, I think, and then we'll take it from there. So we're just getting the album out now and just seeing where it gets us. See who likes it and who wants it, you know?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Coming out of the pandemic, are you finding the performances are coming back for yourself?
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, they are. Last spring it was still a bit shaky, but by the time we were into the summer, I could see that audiences, as far as I could see, were fully back. And so I felt like that by the end of the summer we had kind of reached normality again.
Now, I think a lot of people have changed what they do and how they do it and how much of what they want to do as a result of being through the pandemic. And I certainly got to spend a lot more time in a place than I had done for longer than I can remember. For 30 years, I hadn't actually stood still for that length. And it was nice and I enjoyed it. So I've kind of come out of the pandemic maybe, I mean, I'll continue to tour and play concerts of course, but not at the same rate, I don't think. I think I want to do fewer concerts, but I want to put a lot more energy into them and I want to kind of curate them and develop them and make each of them a little more special, I suppose, in some ways. So that's the plan, anyway.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, that's great. And on your YouTube channel, if people want to learn tunes from you, you have all these beautiful videos where you're teaching tunes.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, yeah, that's right. That started during the pandemic. I mean, I have a Patreon website as well where I teach some one-on-one classes and I provide actual kind of master classes once a month that I record as well. But I also felt during that time with the pandemic that I should, apart from that, also just see if I could put music and tunes in the hands of people, because never was there a time when people had so much time on their hands to learn new tunes with the fiddles. So I thought, well, we'll give something away as well, and we'll let other people contribute as well. So it was kind of a decision to, why not. Everything shouldn't be charged for. Some stuff should be free.
Leah Roseman:
I ended up working with some adults who hadn't played since they were children. And it was a beautiful thing that because of being home alone, or just not necessarily alone, but just having this time, they went back to the violin.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, I think people discovered a lot of things like that during the pandemic. I think in my own case, the first part of the pandemic, my wife and I were in northern Spain, in Asturias, and out in the countryside with a beautiful area. And I saw the buds come on the trees, I saw the leaves emerge, I saw the flowers emerge, I saw the fruit emerge. I saw the grass grow, I saw the weather change. In a way that I hadn't witnessed in a long time. And I also realized how there were elemental things. Being in nature was really nurturing when you let yourself be there for a good period and it changes how you feel and think. Life was about nature. It was about building a fire in the evening and sitting in front of a fireplace and it was about having meals and sometimes sitting outside and just looking at the mountain and hearing the breeze and letting the river flow by. And I thought, boy, okay, maybe I need to do more of this.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I think many of us had similar experiences. Maybe would you like to play another tune and then we have a big topic coming, I think. We should talk about to your friend Dennis.
Martin Hayes:
There's a big topic? Okay. All right, I better play something. Let me see.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you. Do you remember the name of that tune?
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, I do. That one is called The Glen of Aherlow.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Martin Hayes:
It was written by a fiddle player. He would've been a friend of my father's and Paddy Canny's. A man from Tipperary by the name of Sean Ryan. He actually wrote the first two jigs I played as well, just coincidentally.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. I'm curious, do you sometimes use alternate tunings on your violin?
Martin Hayes:
I haven't, no. I just stay in the regular tuning now. I mean, there have been instances of alternate tunings happening in Irish music, but not as common as in American old-timey music, for example. So we do have some examples of it, but not very many.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I was just-
Martin Hayes:
It's not like the American tradition.
Leah Roseman:
...curious about that. Yeah. So I just saw the beautiful tribute to Dennis Cahill that was made, and I can link that directly to this episode.
Martin Hayes:
Okay. Yeah. I entered the pandemic chatting to Dennis and after the pandemic, he was no longer there. We were very, very close friends for a very, very long time and we have a huge lot of shared experience, I suppose. Even I look back at it now, I go like, God, this is unimaginable for me. I never thought about how would our duet end. It didn't seem like it ever would have an end. And there you go.
He was a fabulous musician and a great musical partner for me over the years. I mean, we've had just such a great experience. We traveled together to every corner of the globe and had a great time. Understood each other, I think. And one thing I know for sure was that he appreciated it. We can all get tired and exhausted touring and traveling, and sometimes airports just get to be a bit much. But even so, the fact that we were out there touring and playing music, he was always aware that this doesn't happen for everybody. And actually, we are in the lucky minority of people who get to do this in this way. And he was always really, really, I think, carried a sense of gratefulness for that. He never lost that.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And he became part of your family. It wasn't just musical.
Martin Hayes:
Pretty much, yeah. I mean, he spent almost all his summers on our family farm back in County Clare, and lots of other times during the year as well. It wasn't just the summer. And he became friends with my sisters and my brother, with my father and mother when they were alive. They kind of took him in like he was a son, so he kind of had that relationship. He sat around the Sunday table with us regularly and to the point where he was company, but he wasn't. The same conversation happened around the table with him as without him. So he was very much inside our reality, I think, as a human being. So he was in our family, really. A part of our family, I should say.
Leah Roseman:
Do you find yourself talking to him now?
Martin Hayes:
Every now and again. I do, yeah. I do. I don't know if he can hear me. I think he'd be fascinated with the amount of attention he was getting afterwards, but, well, he deserved it.
Leah Roseman:
So when you met him, he was a jobbing guitarist playing all kinds of styles.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah. He didn't have much involvement with traditional music, and he was just playing these bars and cabaret clubs and stuff like that of Chicago. And he had played in country bars with country bands. He had played in disco bands. He had played in top 40 bands. He had played classical music. He had kind of been part of that earlier folk scene, singer-songwriter folk scene of Chicago from the mid-seventies, I suppose. So he had a fairly diverse background. And no matter what happened, whatever kind of music it was, he was going to be playing music and he was going to do gigs. That was just his life. I was by no means sure I was going to be a full-time musician. He was dedicated to this idea from early teenage years. So he lived it then.
Leah Roseman:
But do you think because he grew up in Chicago, there was a cultural difference in terms of expectation?
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, there was a cultural difference. I mean, it seemed ridiculous to me to even consider a career as a musician because all the musicians I had known, none of them had this as a career. And Dennis, of course, living in America in those times, he could imagine his life as a musician. So he had that quite clear from the beginning. Now, I should say, even though I never planned being a professional musician, music was still the central part of my life, and it was core to my identity, I think, and everything. And it was the central passion that could animate me in a way that nothing else could. So music, whether I made a living or not, was going to be a central part of my life. For Dennis, he had made that decision earlier on and he never really wavered from that.
Leah Roseman:
In terms of the Irish diaspora and the Irish community in the States, was it interesting to you when you emigrated? You lived in the States for a very long time.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah. Yeah. I lived in America for like 26 years. The Irish diaspora of Chicago was a complex, multi-level, layered thing. On St Patrick's Day, you had a whole range of Irish. They were barely Irish at all in any sense. And then there were the old Irish Americans. There was old families going way back into the past, long history of Irishness, if you want to call it that. And then there was the wave of immigrants from the forties and fifties and sixties, even, that were in Chicago that were all established families with children and children going to college. And yet they were Irish and connected. And then in the eighties when I came, there was another wave of young immigrants again, so there were a whole lot of people my age.
And all of those sections of the diaspora listened to different kinds of music. All of them had a different sense of what being Irish was and had different I suppose you could say stereotypes of what all that was. So it was like there was no one Irish thing. That's what I began to realize. That it was a pretty broad spectrum of cultural experiences and expectations, right across all of those versions of being a Irish in America.
Leah Roseman:
One thing I took note of. You wrote, oh yeah, the Irish Musician's Association in Chicago, that the former police chief Francis O'Neill had written all these transcriptions of traditional music.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah. Chicago was where the biggest and most influential collection of Irish music was ever made, really. So O'Neill's 1001 Irish dance tunes collected primarily in Chicago is kind of a musical bible in a way. And so there were traditional musicians going all the way back into the past. I'm going to grab a little book that was written by somebody about Chicago.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful.
Martin Hayes:
Just recently, and it's a big, big, big book here called Cry of a People Gone. Is that correct? Does that look all right?
Leah Roseman:
Yes. And then it says Irish Musicians in Chicago, 1920 to 2020.
Martin Hayes:
That's right, yeah. That's right. It just came out and it's written by Richie Piggott. And it's like all of the musicians that I'd ever known in Chicago when I first arrived there, they're all covered in this book. It's quite a big gathering of that. But yes, Chicago, and going way back, seemed to have that collection of musicians. It was just a big city for that.
Leah Roseman:
But for yourself in Ireland, you'd won the All Ireland Fiddle Championship, what, many, many times and you were known in your community, and then you went there and people didn't know who you were, right?
Martin Hayes:
Yeah. I mean, I think some of the Irish musicians did. There were a handful. But yeah, basically I had to start at the first rung again. Establish myself bit by bit. America's a great place for reinvention, but it's also a place that doesn't care what happened anywhere else. You come here and make it on your own, start from, you know. You're free to do it like so.
So yes, I felt like I had to just start all over in that sense. Make a name for myself, find a career path, find a way through this. I think if I hadn't been in America, I don't think I would have a career to tell you the truth, because there is something about the rough and tumble of the US and it's kind of an unforgiving place, but it's also an incredibly free place. And I was able to build a very small little career first that gradually sustained me. Yeah, I don't know if I'd have been able to do that as easily anywhere else. I mean, I think you could now, but back then it wasn't as easy.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So you were playing a lot of bars, you were playing music that wasn't close to your heart, but it was what people wanted to hear.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah. I mean, that's the eternal paradox that musicians will have to face up to at some point, which is, are you going to be an entertainer? And does that by its nature, say what does the audience want and let us figure out what they want and give it to them? And of course, that makes perfect sense if you're a corporation selling a product, or if you're a company wanting to market a service. You should go and find out what people want and design the best product you can for them to fulfill this need.
But music, I mean, you can do that with music too, and it does get done. But music has a deeper level of reality also, which is that it's what's in one's soul. It's what's in one's soul and heart that needs to connect with another soul and heart. That needs to transform, needs to communicate a deeper truth, a deeper beauty, bring people together in a meaningful experience. But that's not test marketable. That's a different kind of quality of experience. And in some ways, that experience is at odds with the quote, unquote market. So at first, I didn't know what I was doing, I was playing what the audiences wanted. And ultimately it seemed to me not to be so important, what I wanted, just do what they want. Why should I be concerned about me? But of course, if you have something deeper within you, and you don't honor that, and you don't respect that call, it does eat you up gradually, and it kind of becomes quite painful in the end. You're dishonoring something, you're dishonoring yourself in reality. But also maybe in my case, dishonoring a tradition, or dishonoring something that I know is much deeper, much more real, much more powerful. And so I could only handle so much of that, and then like the book testifies I exploded. But I had this conversation, and I think I wrote about it in the book as well, about what one should do in respect to that quagmire of doing what the audience wants and doing what's in your own heart.
And it was this man, Norman was his name, said, "Well, you should play what you want to play, what you love, what's meaningful and deep to you. But you should play it to the audience with an intention of sharing and giving, and you should recognize that the stage is a sacred space where you've been empowered to be truthful, to be real, to be honest, to have integrity." So those ideas became very important to me, and I became reliant on them in a sense, and then decided maybe I should just trust that kind of process and see if it would bring me to somewhere meaningful. And so in a sense, once I gradually figured that out, I was able to take a journey that was a little more courageous, and a little more deep and truthful I think.
Leah Roseman:
And your breaking point in 1988, that's not the same fiddle that you're holding?
Martin Hayes:
No, it's not, no. But that fiddle is happily fully intact and functional, and works fine, I just don't have it here with me now. But it's a good fiddle, and we put it all back together again.
Leah Roseman:
Well, maybe we should talk a little bit about Thomas Bartlett and The Gloaming, that's an incredible story really. And actually, I was just thinking of the story when you first went back to Ireland, you weren't able to return for a number of years because of your immigration status. And I was really touched that you were playing in a place and people were talking, and then you offered to give them their money back if they would just leave, I love that.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah. Well, you see because the point was I don't want to gig at any cost. I want to do a thing, I'm very happy to have a gig, but I want to make something of an experience. I want to create something real. And so in my own mind, it was important to me to say that, "You won't be able to pay me enough to go against that." So I kind of made a decision that there are some kind of lines in the sand. They talk a lot about lines in the sand, but of course if you put a line in the sand, you're going to have to actually stick with it, it's not a line unless you actually respond. So for me, telling the audience that I don't really want to sit up here on the stage and just kind of mumble through tunes here and just make some backdrop.
Now, if I had a gig and they told me, "I just want to play ambient music in the back." I think I'd be okay with that actually. The problem was that that's not what the concert was, we were trying to make something else, and that was the purpose, and I couldn't so I did offer the audience their money back. And I think the next night I offered them again at another venue their money back as well. And you know what? After that, I never had to do that again, that was it. And from that day, people often would say, "Well, now sometimes audiences will be talking and stuff like that." Or, "Do they talk when you're playing?" And I'm going, "No, never, they don't." It's not that I'm going to browbeat an audience into being quiet, they just know I'd probably walk away. And I would too, not in anger, I would just go, "Okay, this is not going to work, so let's leave it."
Leah Roseman:
So I interrupted myself asking you about Thomas Bartlett with that story, sorry.
Martin Hayes:
That's okay. Yeah, I remember touring in Ireland with Steve Cooney, I think it was maybe after the fourth album was out. And we were just traveling around, and we played a bunch of gigs, and we played a gig in Dublin, and played a lot of other gigs. And I guess young Thomas Bartlett, who was 9 or 10, or something like that, was with his parents. And they were on their way to Nepal, but he had an interest in Irish music and stuff. And so they stopped in Ireland for a week or two or something like that on this trek to Nepal from Vermont. And I think he saw in Timeout Magazine that we were actually playing somewhere, that Steve Cooney and I were playing, he said he convinced his parents that they needed to take him there. So he came to the concert.
And shortly after that we had a whole series of gigs, and then Thomas started turning up on all these gigs, and he was in the front row with his parents. And after a few nights I go, "I better talk to these people, they seem to be everywhere." So what happened was that they didn't have any other immediate plans made, and they just decided, we'll just go where Steve and Martin are going on the tour, and we'll just follow them around, and go to the concerts, and see where that takes us. So I know that it took us to Derry on the night of the IRA ceasefire, which was kind of a monumental moment in time in Irish politics and history, because it was essentially the end of the strife. It was at least the beginning of the end of it, and a significant step towards where we are now in the peace process. But young Thomas was there that night, and I did speak to them. And Thomas later said, "I didn't think you'd ever remember." And I probably didn't actually, but I had to be reminded later.
But if we can dial forward then a few years later, I'm back in Seattle and an email comes in, and I didn't recognize the name, nobody did, it was a Thomas Bartlett asking if we ever performed in Vermont. And we wrote back saying, "Well, we'd be happy to perform in Vermont. Is there somebody you know that puts on concerts? And is there somebody we should contact?" Or what have you. And then another email returned saying, "Yeah. In fact, are you free this particular date?" And we give a date. We said, "Yeah." And then the next thing we were booked I guess to play a concert, and everything was going really well, and the communications are going and we think everything is normal. And then we emailed back asking if somebody could pick us up from a train station I think it was, and then the response came back, "Well, I'll have to ask my mom." And then we realize, who the hell is promoting this gig? We just have been booked by a kid.
And we were, we were booked by Thomas. So Thomas Bartlett goes on years later to be a very successful studio musician, touring musician, with bands like The National, and Yoko Ono, and David Byrne, and you name it. He's a serious New York musician anyway, and went on to become the piano player in a band that I played in for a number of years, The Gloaming. But it all started with that young kid in Derry, and then the concert in Vermont. I met Sam Amidon as well, Sam was a friend of Thomas's, and Sam was up in Vermont as well. And I still see Sam, and he has got a great career going as well. Anyway, that's the story of Thomas Bartlett and how I got to know him.
Leah Roseman:
It's an incredible story. I think I heard him in an interview talking about that, that he had your first album, that he'd been listening to a lot.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, that's right. So that straight off, that's an unusual 10-year-old, not your normal 10-year-old. I didn't think I have a lot of fans in that age group. But anyway, I did have one for sure.
Leah Roseman:
But you were the same when you were young, because you were listening to music that your peers weren't listening to.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, I was a bit off center myself I suppose, in what I liked to do, what I thought was important musically. So I was musically old before my time, and very into obscure ways of playing and enjoying the company of older people, and their musical ideas, and feeling quite connected with them, and feeling like I could understand them, and I'm also feeling understood by them. So that was all very important to me growing up.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So The Gloaming was a very successful band, toured big venues all over, you played major halls like Carnegie.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah. Well, I mean, you just never know really with these things. I mean, it's successful, but we're not pop rock and roll success, this is not U2 here. But in this world of traditional music, for that world, it was quite successful I suppose, and in a way that we hadn't anticipated. And sometimes I wonder, when I was putting that band together, did I have any idea about anything? I didn't really, I had no plan about where we're going, or where it could end up, or what it could be, I had not a foggiest notion. It might have lasted a year or six months, or it might have made a record, it might have not. I didn't know how far we could get with any of this, or where it would end up. So it was a very lucky and happy surprise for us, that it just caught on. And it just caught on, I don't know why, I don't know how even.
Leah Roseman:
Well, Dennis was at the core of that with you.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, Dennis was at the core of most of my projects. He kind of came with me in most of the collaborations I did, there were a few exceptions, of course. But Dennis was either with me in the band, or as a duet, or as part of this other quartet that we had. And all kinds of other touring things that we'd done over the years, Dennis and I would be kind of a little unit in the middle of all of these collaborations, so he was a big part of all of this. And I think he was a big part for Thomas as well, in terms of Thomas's own ideas about what kind of chords to use with these tunes, and what kind of approaches could be taken. So I think maybe the stuff that Dennis and I did on the fourth album we made together, which was The Lonesome Touch, I think that had a lot of resonance for Thomas I think as well.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's interesting about choices of harmony, because it's not very harmonic music traditionally.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, there's no harmony available at all that we know of, it's wide open. And wide open means lots of opportunity as far as I'm concerned, and I don't feel like the idea of accompaniment in traditional music and Irish music are the harmonic envelope that we use. Is by no means a closed book, and I think it's all up for grabs still.
So when you look at our ancient harp music, there are no harmonic lines with it, there's no chords, there's no sense of what might have been used. But you can guess, and you can make a good estimate of what they might have played. And so that would feel like a loss in a certain way, that we didn't have it, but it's also a kind of , again too - If you're listening to early Baroque music for example, like Marin Marais or something like that, it's there, it's all written, you don't get to create anything different there really in a fundamental way.
Whereas with our music, there seems to be unlimited freedom to reimagine that and to put the music in a 21st century harmonic world as well. There's no law against it. I mean, the only law against it would be is if it destroys the feeling of the music, or if it undermines what's inherently valuable in it, then I think you're making a mistake. But if you don't sabotage the music in that way, I think there's a big open world of possibility there in front of us.
Leah Roseman:
I was listening to some of your Martin Hayes Quartet with... What's her name?
Martin Hayes:
Liz Knowles.
Leah Roseman:
Liz Knowles, yeah. So she seemed to be playing the viola d'amore.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, it's kind of like a five string fiddle with a larger body. So it's a bit like a viola, and the other part of it is the Norwegian Hardanger, so a kind of resonance in sympathy. So there are a handful of those instruments out there, and I've worked with a good few people who play that instrument as well, like in The Gloaming , Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh played one of them, and in the quartet is Liz Knowles. Now, when I was setting up the quartet, I didn't realize Liz had one of those instruments. So I had actually asked her as a violist. Which was grand, but then halfway through, she goes, "Now you know I have one of these things?" I go, "Oh, like Caoimhín?" She goes, "Would you mind if I brought that instead?" I go, "Sure, what the hell." So anyway, I get to go from having it in The Gloaming to having it in the quartet as well. It's an unusual instrument, but it stands as a lovely kind of counterpoint to the actual fiddle as well, they're quite different sounds, and they create different kind of textual opportunities I suppose.
Leah Roseman:
Have you tried a five or six string electric violin yourself? Just out of curiosity.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, in my younger days I had a five string white ZETA electric fiddle. I don't know, I used to just hit that C string every now and again, I didn't really utilize it. And in truth, I didn't have a great time playing electric fiddle. I just found it kind of a bit disconnected, and wooly, and not detailed in the way that I like things to be. So I was missing that kind of engagement with wood and strings in a way that you can't with electric sound. So it was good when the band was very loud of course, but in reality there was detailing I couldn't ever get out of the electric fiddle.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And did you find the feeling was different because there wasn't the vibration against your body?
Martin Hayes:
Yes, because you're not hearing it here, you're not hearing it up through your jaw bone in the same way, you're hearing it out of an amp down here on the floor. And I go, "Oh my God, if I turn my head my fiddle disappears." Yeah, I found it difficult, I'll be honest.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And the Irish language, you didn't grow up with it, have you learned some as an adult?
Martin Hayes:
Well I mean, we learned it going to school. And I suppose Ireland is famous for its Irish language education, in that everybody studied it, everybody read it, and then nobody spoke it. Well, some people did, but not very many of us. We're very good at reading and writing this, and they didn't really teach us basic conversation. So I could read real books and do that, and yet we didn't speak among ourselves in Irish. And so I still have a good chunk of Irish in my head, but my God, it's not ready at my disposal when I want to speak, and so I would be kind of tongue-tied and slow in a Irish language conversation. But it's a rich language too, and I think there's something very beautiful about it. And it's on my to-do list of things to get fluent in. Instead of reading and writing it, which that was the thing we didn't need to do.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I knew the newer generation was studying, I didn't realize that your generation also. In that tribute to Dennis, a lot of it is in Irish. And when I was watching it with my husband, we realized we needed the subtitles.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, like I said to Donald, the producer, I had a moment when I thought I should try and speak Irish now. But then I go, "I wouldn't have had the freedom to speak as I did." I wouldn't be able to speak with the same freedom and stuff, so I abandoned the idea. I probably would've had to abandon it anyway.
Leah Roseman:
And have you learned Spanish?
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, a bit. I think I'm famously bad at languages, this is the conclusion I'm coming to, that I'm not good with languages. But maybe I'm leaving it too late in life to get serious about them. But I enjoy it though, I kind of keep studying the Spanish, you have to keep engaging with it. But I do enjoy it, I have to say.
Leah Roseman:
There's a part of Spain that has a Celtic connection, right?
Martin Hayes:
Yeah. The north of Spain is facing the Atlantic up there, is largely Celtic, especially from Asturias on over towards Galicia. The sound of Spain there is the sound of pipes, and the sound of Spain in the South of course is flamenco and whatnot. But in the north it's the pipes. So my wife's family are from up there, so they relate to the piping, they relate to that sound. And people up there would regard themselves as being Celtic largely.
Leah Roseman:
Have you learned any of that music?
Martin Hayes:
I haven't, no. I haven't really, for example, learned Cape Breton music, or Breton music, or Scottish music, I stay away from the close relatives. It's kind of something about interbreeding there that I think there's not that much separating us, let's see if we can keep things still in their files. Well, I could be wrong, but I kind of think that.
What would you gain from merging Irish and Scottish music? Except to blur whatever distinctions already exist, I suppose. Because we're essentially the same music, Irish and Scottish music, we're just simply dialects of each other. And I suppose to a greater degree, that's true with Breton music as well. And it's great music, I love it. I haven't really thought about putting my energy into learning any of those music. Now, that's not to say that I don't enjoy them and like them, I do for sure. But I still feel there's so many thousands of Irish tunes, and I have a to-do list of tunes I want to learn still in this music. So it's not like I'm going, "I need to go somewhere else and find new tunes." I don't, I just have so many I want to learn and play here that we'll never run out of material, I suppose.
Leah Roseman:
We talked briefly before about asserting yourself as a performer to make sure people were listening. I also like the story you told about the St. Patrick's luncheon on Capitol Hill, where you played for Obama and other dignitaries. That you researched before, that you'd seen videos and you thought, I don't want to be playing while they're eating lunch, I want to make sure that they pay attention.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah. Well, I didn't play there as some kind of token, or just like they're ticking a box, put the Irish music in the corner, give me the shamrocks and the beer, and we'll celebrate St. Patrick and stuff like that. When I got asked to do it, quite arrogantly, asking the White House social secretary and stuff like that, "Well, we'd like a little stage, we'd like the PA here, we'd like this, we'd like that. We'd like to play for this, how long can we play?" We didn't get to control all the details of this, obviously. But yeah, I kind of said, "I want this to be a real thing." So they did, they set it up the way we wanted and liked. And then when we had 15 or 20 minutes, or something like that, I said to Dennis, "Let's go for it. Let's go for this as if this was a very, very real gig. This is not the moment to start pandering to the audience here and to start giving them what I think they might want to hear, or assuming that they wouldn't be able to understand what I wanted to play, or that it might be too esoteric or whatnot."
So I ignored all of that and decided to play it as if this was a very real gig, a very normal gig for me. And so I dug in deep and played slow air as deep as I could, played with as much passion and feeling as I could. And you know what? I ended up feeling, I made a connection with people like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. They all seemed to really, really connect and enjoy it. And so that was a very heartening experience, that I felt like I was able to reach them musically. That was important, that it wasn't just wheel in the Irish music here and have some kind of tokenism. I'm glad we didn't have that experience.
Leah Roseman:
With the traditional airs, I'm speaking from complete ignorance about Irish music, are they generally vocal songs that are used instrumentally?
Martin Hayes:
Generally, but not all. Some of them don't have lyrics. And you could say they're kind of freeform, they're flexible, they're not stuck to any rigid ... like the old sean-nós singing of the West of Ireland, Connemara, is very free, quite ornamented, very deeply rooted in feeling and passion. And the phrase of the song is shaped by feeling. And so when we play, uilleann pipers would be important ... people in terms of showing the potential in these airs and stuff. And the singing tradition for me would be very important in me understanding how to express these tunes, because when I play, there's a kind of vocal framework in my mind. I try to gesture and use the dynamics of a singer. I try to sing or play a phrase that would be breathable, that would actually make sense if you tried to sing. And so those are the kind of things that are in my thinking when I'm playing airs.
Leah Roseman:
Would you be willing to play an air?
Martin Hayes:
Sure, of course. Yeah.
(music) So that's a tune called A Stór mo Chroí. It's an old air, and it has lyrics. And this one actually has lyrics in the English language, but many of them are in the Irish language. This one is written from the perspective of the people left behind in immigration story, and an appeal to those leaving to not forget, to not be dazzled, to not lose their connection to who they are, where they come from, to not lose that in a way, and to not forget the people behind and the life they left.
There are many aspects of the immigrant story. There's the loss. There's a lot gained when people arrive in these countries, of course, but there's a lot lost as well. And there's often a lot of pain involved. There's the pain of parents who will never see children again. And they used to have this thing, I mean, it's obviously not the same anymore, but they used to have the American wake. Did you ever hear of that?
Leah Roseman:
No.
Martin Hayes:
It was a party, but it was like a wake, it was like a death, it was like a funeral. And they would have the American wake, as they called it, for the people leaving for America. So all the neighbors would come, the music would happen, the party. It was kind of a party, but it was also filled with a tinge of sadness. It was like X amount of people were going to be lost. And many of the people who would've left in those earlier years, perhaps in the 19th century, would never again return. They would never again see their parents. They wouldn't be there to witness their parents' funerals. They would never, ever again see that.
So no matter what bounty the other side held, there was still that flip side of reality for the immigrants, I think. I think in America, that part of it was just kind of brushed aside. You go, "We're in the land of the brave and the powerful and the freedom." And that's also true, of course. There's no question that that's also ... But any immigrant will tell you that there was a deeper sadness as well carried within them. There was a pain. There was a big price to pay for that too.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I mean, I'm Canadian and my grandparents were immigrants, but even my parents being children of immigrants, you carry that with you. And for the Jewish community, I mean, there wasn't anything to go back to either.
Martin Hayes:
That's right. Yeah, the homeland was gone in many cases. Yeah, yeah, that place and connection and stuff like that are very important to the human spirit and psyche. And losing that's a big trauma. And you can tell from Irish American culture the degree to which people held onto this and the affection that was deep-rooted across generations. And of course, it's the very same for Jewish and Italian, and you name it. Whatever immigrants arrived in the new world, there was going to be that story as well.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And now, I mean, a lot of immigrants, they just can't afford to return, or not often, even though we have flights.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, of course. Yeah, it's still going on. I mean, we're in different societies and parts of culture where that's largely behind us now. But yes, of course, for all the migrant people in the world now, and all the homeless people from Ukraine, from you name it, it's a painful reality, a human painful reality that keeps seemingly repeating itself. And it's very sad. There's a lot of pain there.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. For yourself when you're having those dark days in Chicago and you're feeling that disconnect and you couldn't go back for a while, did the music that mean the most to you, were you playing it for yourself, even if you weren't playing it at your gigs?
Martin Hayes:
Oh, I would. Yeah. I would be playing sessions and stuff in Chicago. And I think maybe at the end of the night when there'd be two or three musicians left, I would often just take up the fiddle and go a little deeper and go into that experience, that part of home that had come with me, that part of my early life that I brought to America inside of myself. I would release that every now and again. I mean, I didn't think I could ever utilize that part of who I was musically as a career. That seemed implausible. But I would do it every now and again. And I would try and do it when I was in the company of good friends and musicians who could feel and sense what I was trying to say musically. So I kept the flame going anyway. I didn't ever let that die out completely. No matter what other things I was doing, whether I was in a rock and roll band or whatever I was doing, I still would come back and get a taste of that on a fairly regular basis.
Leah Roseman:
Now, we started this conversation with your dad teaching you fiddle. And I remember from your book saying that after about three years, he said to you gently, "Well, maybe you should just give up," because you weren't making enough progress.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah. Well, I'm sure it was a painful thing for him to have to say, but it didn't look like I had any real flare for this at all. I wasn't making any real progress. And I suppose he was getting exhausted from teaching me some of the same tunes over and over and wondering, "Am I going" ... And I'd say he was thinking to himself he didn't want to be driven crazy trying to teach somebody who wasn't going to make any progress. So he's going, "I'll give you a get out of jail card here. I'll let you off the hook. You're free to go and do something else if that's what you want to do."
So probably a lot of kids would've taken that pass and say, "I'm out of here." But the problem was, I had actually begun to identify with this. I had begun to see myself as this fiddle player and begun to value it as an important part of my life. Now, the question was I valued it, I did a lot of things, but I wasn't working, I wasn't pushing through. But when my father showed that seemingly very honest lack of belief and faith, I kind of go, "Oh my God, he doesn't think I can do it. Oh my God, I better knuckle down." And I did. I did.
So whenever something in my life ... whenever music was under threat, or whenever there was any sense that the music for me might not continue or something, I would suddenly give it this massive priority. I wouldn't let anything get in the way of it. And all through my life, I've protected the music in my life that way. I wouldn't take any job or career or go anywhere, do anything that would ultimately undermine the making of music. There was something deep there that makes me not cross that line, if that makes any sense, you know?
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm. You wrote about one of your very early experiences playing with Mary McNamara, and you said, "We landed in this perfectly comfortable place," and that after that you ... I'm not quoting you directly here, but that you aspired to that feeling.
Martin Hayes:
Yeah, yeah. It was a competition. And in the Fleadh Cheoils, back in those days, you had to compete at the county level. And then in County Clare, you would go on to the monster competition and compete there. And then if you got in fourth or second, I think, you could go onto the All-Ireland competition. So Mary and I were in the ... Were we actually in the adult or under 18? I'm not quite sure. It might have been under 18, or adult, I can't quite remember that now. But in either case, anyway, Mary sprained her ankle at the County Fleadh Cheoil and so she was in bed for them. She wasn't up for playing, but we played anyway. And they adjudicated her, "How about we'll let them go. We give them a pass to the monther."
So we got to the monther and we were late for the competition. We just barely got in the door and we were flustered and rushed, but we just got through that and in second place. So if you were going to the races and you were betting on a horse and you were seeing the farm and you go like, "Oh, they came in here," you'd look at Mary and I going into this competition and you'd say, "I would place money that they won't win this," because it didn't look good. Anyhow, just the background to the story.
So I suppose the point was when we got up to play that competition, we didn't care anymore. We didn't even think about winning, or care, or nothing. And we started to play. And instead of thinking about the competition or thinking about anything else, we just started connecting musically. And then I felt us connecting with the audience, with the room, with the people. And the groove was just exactly right, the tempo was right, everything felt right. We felt like we could read each other's playing. And it just turned into just exactly the kind of music we wanted to play deep down. And we did end up, of course, winning the competition then, but we weren't entering it with a very competitive mindset, I don't think.
But there was just that experience in the room, that feeling of the room transforming as you played, the feeling in the room becoming a palpable thing. And the feeling of connection, the connection between Mary and myself playing, and between the feeling in the room, the audience in the room, the sound in the room, and just suddenly all of the elements coming together in that moment. There was a flow to it. You hear about it in sports, you hear it in all kinds of areas. People talk about that moment of flow, that moment when everything finds ease and is delivered. That was the experience that we had that moment. And it was a very important one for me. I never did forget that again. I always thought, "I know that's real."
However unsure I may have become of myself in the future, I was aware that there is an experience to be had that is very real, that is deep and meaningful, and that it's not found by how well you play, it's not found by technical virtuosity. It's a combination of many different factors. And in many ways it's as much psychological, artistic, spiritual, if you like. There are many things involved in making a moment of beauty other than just simply being able to play your instrument. And for the rest of my life, I've tried to work on myself, be that person, show up in that moment, ready for that moment. That has been more important for me than which reels am I playing and what kind of fiddle do I have and which bow do I have? It could be any of those things. The moment can be created out of humble ingredients, sometimes.
Leah Roseman:
Beautifully expressed. Thank you for that. Well, that seems like a great place to close out. I could talk to you all day, but I won't keep you. Did you want to play one more tune or are you happy with ...
Martin Hayes:
I'll play something for you, for sure, yeah. And let me see now. Maybe you have something I should play. Maybe you are thinking of something now?
Leah Roseman:
I didn't make a list, and I can't pronounce a lot of them, the Irish.
Martin Hayes:
That's okay, no problem at all.(music)
Leah Roseman:
Thank you. And what was that?
Martin Hayes:
The Caolite Mountains. And it was written by a fiddle player by the name of Ed Reavy, who spent most of his life in ... He's from Cavan, but lived all his life really in Philadelphia, wrote a lot of very beautiful fiddle tunes.
Leah Roseman:
Well, it was a real honor meeting you today and hearing about your perspectives. Thanks so much.
Martin Hayes:
Well, Leah, thank you very much, and great to meet you. And I hope that the sound and everything is okay for you, and that it'll all work out.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Thanks for following the series on your favorite podcast player and sharing your favorite episodes with your friends, all of which help find new listeners. I have lots more episodes coming in this season three, with a fascinating diversity of musicians and their stories and music. Have a great week.
Please consider either buying me a virtual coffee as a tip or becoming a monthly supporter, starting at $3 Canadian, which is close to $2 US or two euros, and get access to unique perks. The link is in the description.
