Martin Hayes: ‘Our souls need music, art and poetry, and we need human connection’

The thrill of live music performance feels like a technicolour dream this summer. The pandemic sundered artists and audiences for such a sustained period that returning to the fray brings the kind of intense joy that reminds us of how much we missed one another.

Martin Hayes has been the director of the Masters of Tradition festival in Bantry since its inception 20 years ago. He continues to curate it with the attention of a parent of a new born: tending to the minute details, figuring out the optimal constellation of collaborators, venue and timing – for musicians and audience alike.

This year marks a particularly poignant gathering, with the recent untimely passing of Hayes’ long time musical partner, Chicago guitarist, Dennis Cahill. The duo played together live at the closing concert of the 2019 Masters of Tradition festival, and neither could have imagined that it would be their final performance together in this most intimate and convivial of settings. It was a long way from when the pair first met in Chicago thirty seven years ago.

We need to eat, to sleep, to have shelter, to keep our bodies alive, but we would die without meaning and we would die without beauty.

“We met in 1985,″ Martin recounts, chatting in the Kilkenny sunshine, where he’s performing at the arts festival. “That summer and fall I was working on a construction site, and at night, we went to a lot of Irish bars, as well as blues clubs. I saw Dennis performing in Fox’s bar one night. Dennis used to sing back then. He was such an adaptable, versatile musician.”

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Traditional music was the last thing on the duo’s mind in those early days, when electric guitar, bass and fiddle were the order of the day on the Chicago pub scene.

“Oddly it never occurred to me that this music I had grown up with might be a viable option,” Martin admits, with a wry smile. “I just discounted it as a possibility and thought that nobody would want to hear that. I felt certain about that at the time.”

The fact that Dennis didn’t come from a traditional music background was no deterrent to Martin.

“With Dennis, I had the sense that something could evolve and develop so I asked him to come on the road with me,” Martin recalls. “He hadn’t really done traditional music before that and he was quite nervous about it, but I was quite confident that he would be very good at it. What I suggested to him was that he do what he knows, to respond as he hears. There’s not a set way to play or a predetermined route. There was a freedom for him to pull together all the musical things he knew.”

The clarity that someone from outside the tradition can bring is enormous, Martin believes.

“It’s an interesting thing when you look at in Irish music. Seán Ó Riada wasn’t exactly coming from the fleadh ceoil. Donal Lunny wasn’t either, and neither was Andy Irvine. A lot of the people responsible for shaping this music come from the outside the music,” Martin says.

“I was aware of that and I was always of the opinion that Dennis was another one of these messengers who brought things from other worlds with him. Knowing the roots of the music is essential, but there are musical ideas happening all around you that can be supportive of this tradition, that can help heighten the expression that’s already within.”

The subtlety and delicacy of what Dennis Cahill brought to the pair’s musical endeavours might have been underestimated by some, but this was never anything other than a partnership of equals.

“I never thought of Dennis as an accompanist”, Martin says. “I regarded us always as a duet. In Irish music the primary thing is the melody, so of course I had that primary role with the melody. And Dennis understood that too. We talked a lot about that, and what that meant. In my own playing, I would submit to the melody. But it wasn’t about my playing: it was about what I considered and thought was beautiful in a piece of music, and what I could do to bring that out. And Dennis did the same: we both submitted to what we thought the melody needed to do, no matter what our roles were. We were coming together to support this piece of music.”

Temperamentally, Hayes and Cahill were compatible not only in music, but also in their interest in politics and in the wider world. No matter where they went, it was, as Martin describes it, “easy travelling”.

“Dennis was quiet but funny”, Martin says. “There was a lot of comedy there. He was gentle and elegant. You could bring Dennis into any kind of company, and he knew intuitively how to be there and how to blend with that environment. He was gentle, kind and thoughtful, quite sentimental and a bit of a romantic.”

Martin’s need to explore wider horizons, through the formation of The Gloaming, the Martin Hayes Quartet (with Dennis, clarinettist, Doug Wieselman and violinist, Liz Knowles) and the Common Ground Ensemble, along with his collaborations with Brooklyn Rider meant that his and Dennis’ duo had to accommodate a host of other projects along the way. Did these diverse projects put the pair under pressure or threaten their partnership? In the very early days, perhaps they did, a little, Martin acknowledges.

“Initially Dennis worried that these things would interfere with what we had, and he knew it would take some space and energy from what we had. But it’s also true that we needed to expand and broaden out as well,” Martin says

“With The Gloaming I think he enjoyed it because a lot of the ideas that were formulated by Dennis would have come to fruition in the band. His fingerprint was on everything, even if you didn’t hear the guitar all the time, and one of his biggest fans was Thomas [Bartlett, the Gloaming’s pianist and arranger]. A lot of what Thomas did was inspired by the way Dennis approached the music. The Gloaming was a less intimate musical experience, given Dennis’ style of music, but it still had his imprint.

“With the Quartet, a lot of the chordal ideas that Liz [Knowles] and Doug [Weiselman] were working on were original ideas of Dennis’. So his fingerprints were all over these projects.”

The last two and a half years have left their mark, and Dennis’ passing is something that Martin will grapple with for some time.

“Dennis and I last saw one another in 2019 before the pandemic”, Martin says. “We went into the pandemic and only one of us came out of it. I wrote a book, so I was remembering and digesting a whole life of music. And I started teaching music. It was a reflective period, an inward journey which I enjoyed a lot.

“I had been on a merry-go-round for 20 something years. For the first time in many years, I watched the spring from home, saw the trees changing, and that was something I hadn’t been around to see since I was a child.”

The joy of live performance and the prospect of seeing such fine musicians as Cormac McCarthy, David Power, Lorcán MacMathuna, Daire Bracken and Saileog Ní Cheannabháin gather in West Cork have added potency this summer, Martin admits.

“We need to eat, to sleep, to have shelter, to keep our bodies alive”, he offers, “but we would die without meaning and we would die without beauty. Our souls need music, art and poetry, and we need human connection. We need to be near people and we need to experience music in the space with others. Zoom will never be a realistic substitute for real live experience.”

This year’s Bantry festival is a return to the well in some ways.

“It’s been really wonderful to see musicians being given a subtle space in which to operate, that’s supportive and attentive. To see so many musicians at their very best,” Martin says.

“I have a certain intuitive sense of what will work for musicians – and for audiences too: to be able to touch on the roots of the music but touch on the extended possibilities of the music too, to show the breadth of possibilities. To show where it’s coming from and where it’s going. And to find young musicians who are discovering things and making music in meaningful and interesting ways.

“The great thing is that there are lots of them and that it’s only getting better actually. The younger generations of musicians seem more and more thoughtful and more connected. Their ideas are so interesting.”

The future is likely to hold many more musical adventures, but Martin Hayes is not in the business of trying to recreate the inimitable musical partnership he enjoyed for almost four decades with Dennis Cahill.

“I don’t plan on replacing Dennis”, he says. That is a chapter that has come to its own conclusion. I don’t plan to replicate that. I’ve seen others trying to replicate things, and that never works.”

Masters of Tradition runs from Wednesday, August 24th, until Sunday, August 28th; Bantry, Co Cork; various venues, times and prices; westcorkmusic.ie/masters-of-tradition/