Fiddling at the edges of jazz

What do you get when you mix a master jazz guitarist, an American playing Irish trad, and a virtuoso fiddle player? Martin Hayes and Bill Frisell explain the combination to Ray Comiskey

The delays Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan had in meeting up in Sleepless In Seattle were nothing to those experienced by Bill Frisell and Martin Hayes in finally getting together to make music - and that's despite the fact that they were both living in Bill Gates's home town. And it's ironic that, now, when this meeting of jazz and Irish traditional music is at last about to happen, in a one-off Irish tour organised by Note Productions, Hayes doesn't live in Seattle any more, having moved to Connecticut about 18 months ago.

They are, as Frisell puts it, "both moving targets as far as travelling is concerned", which is why it proved impossible to talk to them both simultaneously. Yet there was a benefit in that; it allowed each to speak freely about the other without a sense of embarrassment, or, as Hayes might have put it, but didn't, without scratching each other's backs at a mutual admiration party.

Each is pre-eminent in his own field. Frisell, soft-spoken, polite and modest to the point of diffidence, is an individual and adventurous talent, one of the great guitarists on the current jazz scene, with a CV and a recording career that is astonishing in its variety and mastery. A Grammy winner, he has worked with everyone from Malian musicians, to John Zorn, Elvis Costello, Vinicius Cantuária and Marianne Faithfull. His humility, given the scope of his gifts, is astonishing and humbling.

Hayes is articulate, friendly, direct, open and speaks his mind, a very bright man whose intelligence is coloured by an awareness of things of the spirit, so it's no surprise to find these characteristics reflected in his playing. A native of Co Clare, he's a traditional fiddler of extraordinary quality, which is in itself too limiting a description for a musician who combines great delicacy with emotional truth, and who has the rare gift of sounding as if he and the instrument are one.

They met, Frisell recalls, "probably soon after I moved to Seattle in the early 1990s. I went to a little concert close to my house and heard him for the first time. I didn't know anything about him and he was playing alone at the time." Hayes is now part of a duo with Irish-American guitarist Dennis Cahill, who will join them to play on tour here.

"I'm not a scholar or anything," continues Frisell. "I don't know anything, really, about Irish music. I'm sure there's a lot of things that I play that are derived from it. So much American music comes from it. So hearing him in this very pure state was really a moving experience for me. I met him and it turned out that he had all my albums. I was very surprised because he was coming from such a very different place."

Martin Hayes was no less taken aback to meet Frisell. "I was listening to him before I ever moved to Seattle and I was shocked when I found out that he lived there. And then he was a guy I kept running into all the time when I was there." It was about then, 15 years ago, Frisell remembers, that they began to talk about playing together. With both on the road so much it was difficult to take it beyond wishful thinking. And there was something else. "I think," says Frisell softly, "we were both kind of" - a long pause - "afraid, or something." It's hard to imagine fear being part of these players' lexicons. Perhaps anxious is a better word.

WHEN NOTE PRODUCTION'S Gary Sheahan, who has organised the tour, asked Hayes what jazz musicians he would like to play with, Frisell was the obvious answer, particularly since he has made a habit of crossing musical boundaries.

"That's right," says Hayes. "Plus the other thing is he has a very interesting kind of harmonic take on things, and I could imagine his chording with the kind of things we were doing." Frisell is also a wonderful rubato player, so, given the strong rhythmic basis of much of Irish music, what challenges and opportunities might that raise? Hayes politely but firmly dispatched that question to the shredder. "Well," he answers, "it's debateable whether that is the way traditional music really is, to begin with. I mean, particularly in the past, the county where I come from, there's been a version of the music that's a much gentler, free-flowing version. I mean I play rhythmically and sometimes I play in a more kind of nuanced way.

"But I have a lot of music that I think is set at a pace and moves at a rate that I think would be very suitable for Bill. So I'm not too worried about that. I think it's a bit of a misnomer for traditional music to be always understood as this kind of just driving thing, because it's so one-dimensional, you know? And it does Irish music no service at all to have people always play it like that. But that's another story altogether."

Has he any thoughts about what the trio might play? "I've been digging through material that we'll probably work on, maybe some slower marches and different things like that. I'm looking for things where we can create openings for Bill to do his kind of thing as well. I've a feeling, like, he's going to play more on our side of the fence than we on his side of the fence," he laughs deprecatingly. "I think we can tie it together."

So what about Irish repertoire? "Well, there's a lot of Irish repertoire and Dennis and I have been tampering on that kind of improvisational edge somewhat with some of the pieces of music. So in some of them we have created kind of improvisational opportunities within, and so we're going to use some of those melodies that we already have some experience with doing that, as a kind of jump-off point for Bill.

"We'll obviously play as a threesome, but there'll be points where, I think, there are tunes where we can have some patterns that we'll play underneath and let Bill go on his journey as well, and then come back, and vice versa." Are there any pieces derived from jazz? "Right now," he says, "I'm kind of snooping through some of Bill's records, some of the things where there would be melodies that I can perhaps grab on to a bit more easily than, we'll say, like taking some of the Monk tunes, or something like that. Thelonious Monk's pieces are very idiosyncratic, anyway, aren't they?

"They are, yeah. I'm not going to play them. I don't know what other ones, but," he laughs, "we won't be doing Giant Steps." This is the late John Coltrane's murderously difficult harmonic death trap for improvisers.

"I have hundreds of jazz CDs," Hayes adds. "I'm always listening to jazz, and I listen to jazz as your Joe Schmoe listener. I'm not trying to become a jazz head. I just enjoy it. I'm always searching around, so for me it's kind of an opportunity to dip my foot in there. And I'm also excited to work with somebody who works at such a high level. I'm just curious to see how that will evolve."

Frisell shares that curiosity. "Like Martin," he says, "I don't know exactly what's going to happen, but for me the way I learn and progress is these moments of getting together with people that I don't know. Some of those are the strongest, biggest bursts of energy and learning.

"And it's all artificial, boundaries. I'm not going to say I'm not a little bit nervous. I'm always nervous, but my experience is that the music always comes through and" - there is a long pause before he adds, very softly - "saves us."

Hayes puts it even more succinctly: "With music, it either speaks or it doesn't, you know."

Martin Hayes, Dennis Cahill and Bill Frisell play Glór, Ennis, Co Clare on Fri, Vicar Street, Dublin on Sat, and Cork Opera House on Sun