Martin Hayes has long been admired for his reflective style. His latest projects continue his musical exploration, writes Siobhán Long.

If ever there were proof of the redundancy of the tradition versus innovation debate, Martin Hayes is surely it. Long admired for his reflective east Co Clare fiddle style, he's never been afraid to strip the meat from the bone, exposing the tunes of his home place in all their naked glory.

At a time when the world seems hell bent on increasing its revolutions per minute to a breakneck pace, Hayes has steadfastly resisted the temptation to rush headlong into the fracas.

Instead he focuses his energies on creating enough space in the music to accommodate player and listener in a place where both can languish, buoyed by the happy pursuit of perfection amid the notes.

His Feakle roots have served him well. His father, the late P. Joe Hayes, a stalwart member of the renowned Tulla Céilí Band, was an able partner for the young Martin, who trawled through the local cache of tunes with the forensic attention of a Poirot. The last decade has seen him engaged in a seamless musical partnership with the Chicago guitarist Dennis Cahill.

Now based in Seattle, and ricocheting back and forth across the Atlantic with the ease of a musician for whom the art of straddling time zones is merely a minor encumbrance, Hayes seemingly refuses to sit still except when immersed in music. And these days that music is taking him to places many musicians wouldn't dare to tread.

He's recently finished composing some of the score for a Seattle dance theatre production, The Vivian Girls, in collaboration with the choreographer Pat Graney, inspired by the watercolours and texts of Henry Darger, a reclusive Chicago artist who died in 1973. He and Cahill have also recently completed an original score for the award-winning film Photos To Send, a documentary directed by Dierdre Lynch (and screened at Dublin International Film Festival last month), which traces the footsteps of Dorothea Lange, a Life magazine photographer who came to Co Clare in 1954 to catalogue the people of the Mount Callan area.

And then there's the short animated film Cuilín Dualach, on which he's collaborating with the director Nora Twomey. With a workload like that, small wonder that Hayes wastes little time pondering the finer points of traditional- music politics.

"The Vivian Girls didn't have any of the structure of Irish music," he says wryly. "There were some childlike melodies, but there were also a lot of dark harmonies, and I suppose it might be considered to be closer to classical music or jazz than to traditional music. I listen to an awful lot of everything, including classical and jazz, without ever intending to do anything with it, but I suppose it does sink into you whether you're making a decision or not to do so.

"I went to see [the jazz guitarist and composer\] John McLaughlin again recently, and it was fearsome stuff altogether - that concert was reeling around in my head for months afterwards. There's an intensity, a focus and an energy to it that you want to be able to capture yourself in concert. That doesn't mean that I want to play any notes that he played, but it makes you realise that there's a lot of untapped potential out there in the music you're doing yourself. Irish music can still really evolve, there's no question about that."

Anyone who has seen them in concert in recent years will know that Hayes and Cahill have fused their well-known affinity with jazz with traditional music, bringing an improvisational quality to tunes and yet still managing to retain their identity.

No strangers to frenetic energy on stage, they allow the music to transport them beyond the shackles of any one genre, and in the process they carry audiences with them into stratospheres that demand more than mere passive listening for sustenance. For Hayes this is simply an extension of the sessions he played as a youngster in Pepper's pub in Feakle and in the Tulla Céilí Band.

"You only have to look at the simple logic that no music can be born complete," he says. "It has to evolve and develop from one thing to the next - and it always does. If there isn't motion in tradition it's like a photograph, a still. I think sometimes traditional music suffers from that and yet nobody loves it more than I do. I'm as into Willie Clancy and Seamus Ennis and Tommy Potts as anyone could be, but at the same time if there isn't an individual artistic journey for everyone playing it, then it starts to contract.

"I think it would be dishonest for me to just simply play east Clare music, giving some suggestion that I was some kind of a hermit who didn't hear other stuff. It would be a selectivity based on some kind of local tribal identity that's unrealistic, so I will listen to the music of Donegal and the bands of the 1970s and Frankie Gavin. It would be insane to ignore the progress in so many other areas, but my underlying dialect is clearly from east Clare. I try to put my arms around the whole thing, of whatever's going on in Irish music."

Hayes's geographical distance from his home place helped hone his understanding of his music, giving him space to see it and hear it from a sufficient distance to be able to tease out its intricacies without the interfering buzz of local debate. "There was definitely a distancing by being in the States that separated sentimentality from actual fact," he says. "I have a sentimental attachment, obviously, to the music of Paddy Canny and my father, but on the other hand it was good music too. I was also able to come to conclusions that it wasn't always based on musicianship necessarily. It was often based on sincerity of expression, and although I do believe in technique, of course, that sincerity always trumped everything else in music.

"In fact sometimes there's an inverse relationship between technique and pure soul and presence in music. A musician who is clearly not able to exhibit technical virtuosity can't be tempted in that direction and so can only play from the point of view of enjoyment and feeling, and it's something that virtuoso playing often loses, because you can get so consumed in the technique and challenges that you lose the soul of it.

"Sometimes I try to play as flashy as possible and then play as simple as possible, so that at least you know I'm making a deliberate decision to play simply. But I know that flamboyance has a place, but it shouldn't dominate. It shouldn't all be adrenaline and testosterone-driven, because after a while that wears you out."

His work with dance theatre, with film and, now, with animation has taught Hayes to let go, to hand over the music so that it can become something else entirely in the hands of a choreographer or director. "In truth I would never be done with anything if someone didn't take it away from me," he says. "Without a deadline I'm never finished. There's nothing perfect when you look back on music. There is perfect when you're consumed in a piece of music at a particular moment, but looking at a trajectory of your musical development you're never happy with that."

Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill play Glór Irish Music Centre, Ennis, on Thursday and the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Friday