The TG4 Gradam Ceoil is the Oscar of the traditional music world, and the top gong this year goes to Clare fiddler Martin Hayes, writes Siobhán Long.
If the prophet struggles for recognition in his or her home place, then what of the musical genius who journeys far, earning accolades from every corner of the globe? Adventurous of spirit and hungry of palate, he manages to strip the music back to the barest of its bones, and at the same time, lures it into terrain previously uncharted. That's the kind of musical invention that links the music of the Tulla Céilí Band, Paddy Fahy and Paddy Canny with that of contemporary jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and Chicagoan guitarist Dennis Cahill.
The tie that binds them all is Martin Hayes, a sublime fiddler who has taken the kernel of the music of east Clare to places where it's never been heard before. He's stripped its tunes, lovingly honed by generations, and exposed their beating heart; and he's done all this from his adopted home place of the United States, firstly from Seattle and more recently from New England, where he goes about his business with the quiet intent of a man who'd be infinitely happier if he never had to engage with the business end of this inconsolably intimate music that is his life.
Shifting with no small degree of discomfort beneath the laurel of TG4 Gradam Ceoil Traditional Musician of the Year for 2008 - the award will be announced this evening - Hayes is in customary low-key mode. He's not one for hyperbole - even when attempting to make sense of the US presidential campaign. Hayes shares a home constituency with not one, but two former Irish Presidents, Éamon de Valera and Paddy Hillery, and he's nothing if not a political animal to his core.
Undeniably delighted to be honoured this year, he admits to being surprised that the judging panel (see panel) would give him the nod, and delighted that they give equal consideration to artists who are commercially successful alongside those who choose not to pursue commercially viable careers in traditional music.
"To me, it's recognition from inside the world of the music itself," Hayes admits, "which I haven't had in a long time. That vote of approval from the inner sanctum of the music is a very nice thing; it gives you a bit of strength going on. I think these awards have played a great role in acknowledging and rewarding people who many times go unrecognised. I never thought I'd get it because in some ways I thought the view would be 'sure, amn't I getting enough?' I have a successful career and I honestly thought they'd feel they'd give it to someone who needs it more, who hasn't been recognised."
HAYES IS NO stranger to awards, having been All-Ireland fiddle champion on no less than six occasions (two of which were in the senior competition). Yet he treads warily on any notion of using musicians as yardsticks against which music can be measured with any kind of objective credibility. He cites a recent experience of adjudicating at a céilí band competition at last year's Ennis Traditional Music Festival, (where each judge picked radically different winners), as supreme evidence of the folly that underpins much of our notions of musical competition these days.
"Is there an objective means by which you can measure music?" he asks. "I think you can group people according to level, but when you get 10 people of a comparable level of technical proficiency into a room, how on earth can you determine who's better? I think at that point it all boils down to personal preference. Now, that's not to say that I'd knock competitions entirely. Part of me really loved doing it: the adrenaline, the fun and the camaraderie of it. I met friends at competition who have remained friends my entire life."
With a much-anticipated and long-awaited fifth album, Welcome Here Again, due out in February (more than eight years after his and Dennis Cahill's last release, Live In Seattle, and a decade after the release of their seminal collection, the Zen-like The Lonesome Touch), Hayes is content to let the music speak for itself. No roller-coaster rides for him, punctuated by yearly release schedules, conjured up at the whim of some disembodied record company executive.
"First of all, I don't think that in any music, the regimented schedule of an album every year and a half is something that's artistically do-able," he declares, cutting to the heart of the matter in milliseconds. "There mightn't be any good reason to do that; I mightn't have any new ideas when I walk into the studio, and the other thing is that I didn't want to replicate my previous recordings. That's not to diminish them in any way, or to suggest that I didn't think they weren't worth making: they were and are, but I didn't think it would be worth buying them again, in a repackaged format. I had a fear of imitating myself again, and that fear was bigger than the fear of not having a record."
AT A TIME when regional styles are on the wane, Hayes believes that the future of traditional music rests unequivocally in the hands of each individual musician. For his own part, he has placed far more emphasis on the anatomy of tune than the tune set, forensically revealing its inner core, rather than burying it in the busy crossroads of lengthy or meandering tune combinations.
"To be honest, I think that the individual becomes more important than the region at this stage," he says. "I think it's up to each musician to find the uniqueness in his or her own music: and that's defined by how they themselves see the music. If they allow themselves that courage to view it in that light, that is their voice. The other thing is to see the uniqueness in each melody as well, and to resist falling into the trap of playing reels or jigs in a particular way. Every tune is a unique little story and I feel the great value in the music is when we treat them individually. I put a lot of my energy into trying to find ways of bringing the uniqueness of a melody out."
The primacy of the individual voice is something that Hayes holds dear, and he's optimistic about its future as a driver of traditional music.
"There are unique voices," he says, "and it's in the younger generations that I'm hearing them. It's very difficult for any musician to changes horses mid-stream. I think for better or worse, I'm probably cast the way I'm cast now, as a musician. There probably won't be a huge change in the way I play music for the rest of my life. Maybe there will or maybe there won't. But there's a lot of intelligence in the way people like Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Oisín MacDiarmada play music. Mind you, if you look at some of the more established fiddle players - Frankie Gavin, Tommy Peoples, Kevin Burke and Liz Carroll - are remarkably different fiddle players. Seán Keane of The Chieftains is absolutely and utterly personally unique. So when you look up to someone as a musician, you find a singularity to their approach and a uniqueness to their style. They're searching, they're thinking, and they're courageous about what they do."
The 2008 TG4 Gradam Ceoil Awards will be announced in Ennis tonight. The ceremony is on Mar 21 in the INEC, Killarney. For bookings, call 064-71555 or www.inec.ie. Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill's latest CD, Welcome Here Again, is out on Feb 8 on Compass Records
