In their eclectic new album with Seamie O'Dowd, the versatile Máirtín O'Connor and Cathal Hayden have managed to bottle the essence of their dynamic live shows, writes SIOBHÁN LONG
MÁIRTÍN O'CONNOR HAS that glint in his eye again. It's that spark that ignites his finest original tunes, another rake of which lurk within Crossroads, his latest recording project. For the past eight years this peerless accordionist and composer has been playing regularly with fiddle and banjo player Cathal Hayden (who also plays with Four Men and a Dog) and guitarist Seamie O'Dowd (a multi-instrumentalist who formerly played with Dervish and now works with a wide range of musicians, including Thom Moore and Mary McPartlan). Anyone who has witnessed O'Connor, Hayden and O'Dowd's dynamic live performances will be relieved to find that they've bottled that elusive effervescence in the studio – no mean feat for players who have many other musical identities too. Their choice of album title, Crossroads, sums up their sense of their own musical journey.
"Crossroadsas a title seemed apt to us because there are new tunes meeting old tunes," O'Connor explains, "and there are different genres of music coming to meet each other."
Amid a healthy mix of traditional Irish tunes, O'Connor, Hayden and O'Dowd have tossed in a selection of tunes and songs with echoes of American old-time gypsy folk, classical music and even a hint of oriental inscrutability. In the hands of lesser musicians, such a wildly diverse mix might result in nothing more than a cacophony, but Crossroadssizzles with these influences in high definition, each tune and song inhabiting its own space with the authority and confidence of music that knows where it's come from – and has a sense of where it's heading to.
People, personalities and personal stories pervade this recording like confetti at a wedding. You simply cannot listen to Fast Boat to Kowloonwithout finding yourself transported on to that Hong Kong ferry, your ears tweaked by the traces of eastern mystery in the arrangements. And you certainly couldn't miss the sense of history and kinship in The Road Together, a waltz O'Connor composed for his Dutch in-laws, Tsjalling and Geartsje, who have been together for an incredible 70 years. The contributions of his children, Tom, Ciara and Sinéad on guitar, fiddle and cello add further to the sense of continuity, of a music birthed by O'Connor but perched effortlessly in the traditional music firmament for all three generations to test and taste its essence in whatever way they choose.
YET ANOTHER CROSSROADS – albeit one that the musicians didn't anticipate and would have preferred not to have had to encounter – is characterised by the premature death of Micheál Ó Domhnaill, who was a long-time collaborator of O'Connor and Hayden's. Flowers in the Windsees O'Connor pay due tribute to a musician who left his indelible mark on them, as he did on The Bothy Band and so many others.
“That’s another crossroads – in the sense of departure,” O’Connor observes, and adds mention too of the late Jimmy Faulkner. The beauty of such remembrances, though, is that musicians’ contributions live on in the tunes.
“It’s still hard to believe that they’re gone because they still hold such a powerful place in our hearts and minds. When we used to play with Micheál , he would get into this hypnotic groove and he’d find some little chord pattern and a non-compromising rhythm, which was great.”
That momentum was a formidable driving force for both O’Connor and Hayden.
“He always allowed the music to breathe,” Hayden says. “There was a turn, or something special about every tune, and he was able to find that and bring it out. He always let the music flow.”
The refusal, in Crossroads, to cleave to the hard line of the tradition is the album's greatest strength. Tunes flow from one to the other, crossing borders with steely determination. If Django Reinhardt, Handel, Stephane Grappelli, Rory Gallagher, Andy Irvine and Paddy Tunney can make one another's acquaintance on its byways without striking a discordant note, then O'Connor, Hayden and O'Dowd must have a hotline to that elusive zone where the only thing that matters is the music.
It’s the kind of genre-bending that is both invisible and utterly seductive. “I suppose you might call it mercurial,” O’Connor suggests tentatively. “There’s as much of that as possible, I think, as well as us bouncing off each other as we try to go with the energy of the music.
“Seamie is a real master of dynamics. He sees where the energy is, and he’s ridiculously versatile, so he’s able to go with the flow. He’s like a guided missile. He might go towards what you’d hope he’d do and then you might make just a small comment, and suddenly he’s got the tune right there too. He’s incredible.”
A scattering of O'Connor's magnificent original tunes propel Crossroadsinto the stratosphere at regular intervals. For a musician whose canon of original music is ever-expanding, he's hesitant to suggest that he adopts a particular method when composing.
“It’s difficult to describe, in a sense,” he says. “When I finish writing a tune, I wonder: ‘Well, how did I do it?’
“It’s like the person who asked the centipede to identify what leg he prefers to lead with when he walks – and he never walked again! There’s a certain element of trust, and allowing your mind to go where you hope it might go.”
O’Connor talks affectionately about “the little conversations” the three musicians can have within a tune, where the impromptu turn that one musician might take gives licence to the others to bask in the ebb and flow as well.
This is music that is most certainly not set in stone. It’s what O’Connor smilingly calls “the living tradition”.
O’CONNOR AND HAYDEN have both worked with classical musicians in the past.
O'Connor first played on Bill Whelan's Seville Suiteback in 1992. Since then, O'Connor and Hayden have played (alongside producer and multi-instrumentalist Garry Ó Briain) with the ConTempo Quartet, their repertoire encompassing both classical and original tunes written by O'Connor in the traditional idiom.
Although O’Connor and Hayden admit to being intimidated at first by the prospect of playing within the formality of a classical setting (“You have nothing to cling on to, in a sense, while they have their sheets of music,” as O’Connor notes wistfully), it proved not to be the straitjacket they feared. In fact, with that glint in his eye again, O’Connor is quick to point to the little-known fact that Hayden introduced the banjo into baroque music. For his part, Hayden is quick to acknowledge the benefits he gleaned from the experience, which have shaped his approach to his music ever since.
“I learned a lot about the importance of each and every note”, he acknowledges modestly. “In traditional music, it can be easy to let notes slide into one another or to have variations and improvisations where you can easily lose five or six notes, but since playing with the ConTempo, I learned a lot from their discipline. Every note counts, and every note has its place.”
Perhaps there are facets of the traditional learning style that might serve classical musicians well too, O’Connor suggests.
“When a child is learning classical music, they learn to read music straight away,” he says. “Which is a pity, because they become totally reliant on the written note, whereas essentially music is aural. Somehow or other, it doesn’t allow at least some of them to develop their ear, and their confidence to learn without reading the notes.”
Both musicians have forged their reputations on live performances, interspersed with occasional recordings. They’re both sanguine about our current economic woes and their possible impact on a musician’s livelihood.
“I think for most musicians, the Celtic Tiger never came anyway,” O’Connor says. “As someone said, the lower the rung of the ladder that you’re on, the smaller the distance is that you have to fall. I’m not saying that we’re impoverished, because we’re not, but at the same time, I think it was for a select few that the Tiger roared loudest.”
Crossroadsis on Claddagh Records
