Making magic

The visitor to Ceol, the traditional music centre in Smithfield, is watching a video of Martin Hayes playing the fiddle. She's sitting down, listening and absorbed, in one of the labyrinthine rooms in the building. Other people enter the room. The video plays on. Then there is the sound of another fiddle - a real one.

For a few moments, the sound of the fiddle on the video and the sound of the real fiddle in the room seep into each other, and then the tune becomes so strong that the visitor realises someone is playing live. She turns from watching Martin Hayes on screen to see the man himself in person, melded to his fiddle, as a photographer snaps away. It is an extraordinary moment of shifting realities, which spark off each other and create something quite magical in the process.

Magical, that hoary old fey word which reporters and critics usually shy away from like cats from water, is the bon mot here. Clare-born Martin Hayes and Chicago-born Dennis Cahill, have been playing fiddle and guitar together for some years now, developing a unique musical partnership, which critics have likened to two jazz masters.

After the photo session, Hayes and Cahill perch together on the edge of Hayes's hotel bed. It's a slightly unorthodox setting for an interview, but in keeping with the spirit of the way they do most things. Their latest CD, Live in Seattle, came out in September to huge acclaim, and they've been playing in London, Edinburgh, and various Irish venues on this latest tour. Tonight is Dublin's Vicar Street.

"On the days we're doing gigs, I'd visualise the venue all through the day; see myself sitting on the stage," Hayes explains, peering out from under his trademark nimbus of hair. "That's the whole focus of the day, the gig. We don't do any sightseeing or anything, even if we're in some new city. It's important to focus, to have a sense of occasion about performing."

The duo's astonishing live performances are events which critics and audiences alike rave about. In an interview in 1998, Hayes likened describing performance to "talking about electricity. I don't know what electricity is really but I can turn a light switch on and off." The two musicians play together like flints striking off each other; an initially unlikely-seeming combination of fiddle and guitar which swiftly transforms into fire.

"Playing with an audience is like having a conversation," Hayes explains. "When somebody empathises with you, you pour out more and more and take the music further than you'd ordinarily go. If you're playing a really good gig, you're like an observer. You look down and wonder what your fingers are doing. But when it's not going well, you have to stop these destructive musical thoughts running around, annihilating your gig. I don't want to sound too woosh, but there has to be love in your playing."

When they go on tour, they have a set programme, but it "gradually becomes mutated by the end of the tour. We don't have any big swaps, but the programme goes through gradual changes; it evolves at a rate we can't control".

Hayes believes in an afterlife, but not any kind that can be easily defined. "Most of my ideas are driven by some sense of spirituality these days. My music would be informed by that, yes. Culturally, I'm a Catholic."

"Every musician, after you get to a certain stage, you question why you play," Cahill observes. "When you're playing, you're trying to express something bigger than yourself. Look at the jazz musicians - they were all very spiritual."

Of the duo, it is Cahill who appears the more shadowy, elusive presence. In performance, Hayes's hair flies in all directions; his fingers and arms are wild streaks of quicksilver. Cahill has no hair to take flight, and he hunches carefully over his guitar, hardly ever looking up. It's Hayes too, who speaks to the audience and who fluently introduces the tunes with a natural sense of humour, gravitas, and quickness that reflects his musician's superb sense of timing.

The melodies of Hayes's fiddle seem at first like the larger sound of the two. Yet what Cahill does, chasing, shadowing, and drawing out the melodies with the unerring rhythm of his guitar chords, is as unpredictable as the movements of a lion hunting a gazelle. Just because he sometimes flattens down in the long grass doesn't mean he's not there.

"I kinda like being anonymous," Cahill confesses. "The core is the melody - the fiddle. But the harmony of the fiddle and the guitar together can create something quite different. It can enhance the musical experience."

"I couldn't play this sort of music if Dennis wasn't playing with me," Hayes insists. "We're like two hands on a piano."

The fiddle lying in its box on the floor of Hayes's hotel room is the same one which has been with him throughout his extraordinary musical career. "My father had it before me (the redoubtable P.J. Hayes, longtime stalwart with the Tulla Ceili Band). He bought it in the early 1950s; it's a German fiddle, late 19th century. He didn't like it, so it got put up in the attic. When I was 12 and needed a full-size fiddle, he brought it down for me. I've had it ever since - it's what I record with, perform with, everything. It's rare to find an instrument for life so early."

"Guitar players are very fickle," jokes Cahill. "We don't have the same attachment to our instruments. I've probably been through five guitars since we started touring together. They make such good instruments these days, that it's not so difficult to find a guitar to suit you."

Martin Hayes's fiddle case is about the same size as the tiny suitcase on the other side of the room; a suitcase which he says he would be quite happy living out of all year. Although his base has been in Seattle for some years now, he doesn't own property anywhere, and although he doesn't say so, the sense is that he quite likes this nomadic perspective on the world.

"I come back to Ireland for about three months every year. I come back so often that I don't feel disconnected from it. If I lived here, I'd probably spend as much time away from Ireland as I do now. Playing in the Feakle festival (in east Clare) each year is a must," he says.

"Clare," muses Cahill. "That's where I first learned to drink tea."

For 2000, apart from the traditional return to Feakle, they would like to play in Asia. "I'd like to get out of the English-speaking world," Hayes says. "To go playing in China or India." Perhaps it's no coincidence that these are the two great tea-producing countries in the world.

After Hayes and Cahill's performance that evening at Vicar Street - at which there are two brief appearances by guest singers with haunting voices, Helen Hayes and Finola O'Siochru - they get a standing ovation. The walls of Vicar Street seem to dissolve. We could be anywhere. For a couple of hours, the music becomes a kind of fourth dimension, through which the audience make their own individual journeys. The tunes flow into each other, effortless as the course of water in a swift river.

It's no wonder their latest CD, Live in Seattle, with tunes such as Green-Gowned Lass, Out on the Ocean, and Mary McMahon of Ballinahinch, is attracting rave reviews: listening to it is the closest you can come to the experience of being at one of their extraordinary concerts.

Live in Seattle, by Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill, is available on the Green Linnet label, at £13.99