Curations in
Martin Hayes
Curations out
Who's taking you?
- Curation by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Martin Hayes
- City: County Clare
- Country: Ireland
My Life
-
Bio:
I grew up in a household filled with music in a locality with a rich musical heritage. My father PJ Hayes and my uncle Paddy Canny were both highly respected fiddle players in the world of Irish music. My father also led the Tulla Ceili Band for most of his adult life. The place where I grew up had its own distinctive sound and its own take on Irish traditional music. The style was characterized on the one hand by a particular rhythmic lift and on the other hand by a highly expressive lyricism. From the very beginning I loved this music and was eager to play. I got my first fiddle when I was seven and the slow process of imitation and absorption began in our kitchen with my Father as my teacher. In the learning process the dominant message always coming to me from my father and lots of the finest musicians of county Clare was their idea that music must first express feeling. In their opinion no amount of technical prowess could compensate for an absence of soulfulness.
I wasn’t content to simply imitate and reproduce, I needed to decipher the deeper musical aspirations of the older musicians. I needed to get to the heart of this music.
I ultimately concluded that this music at its essence is a direct and simple expression of feeling. The melodies are sometimes deceptively simple but almost always beautiful and the rhythm is both understated and entrancing. There is an innate wisdom, a kind of common sense inherent in the tunes that still continues to inform my musical journey.
My mission is to express this musical essence in a manner that can be understood and felt by music lovers around the world. A fundamental driving belief for me is that the local musical vernacular can be a universal language when fully embraced. My engagement with the tradition, as I express it on stage, has become a process of distillation and translation.
Martin Hayes’ soulful interpretations of traditional Irish music are recognized the world over for their exquisite musicality and irresistible rhythm. He has toured and recorded with guitarist Dennis Cahill for over twenty years, and has collaborated with extraordinary musicians in the classical, folk and contemporary music worlds such as Bill Frisell, Ricky Skaggs, Jordi Savall, Brooklyn Rider and the Irish Chamber Orchestra, RTE Concert Orchestra as well as many of the greatest traditional Irish musicians over the past thirty years. Martin has contributed music, both original and traditional arrangements to modern dance, theatre, film and television. He has performed on stage with Sting and Paul Simon and recently recorded with Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Project. He is the artistic director of Masters of Tradition, an annual festival in Bantry, Co. Cork and a co- curator for the Marble Sessions at the Kilkenny Arts Festival.
Martin has been recognized as Musician of the Year ( Gradam Ceol) from TG4, Irish language television, Person of the Year by the American Irish Historical Society in New York City and is recipient of the annual Spirit of Ireland award from the Irish Arts Center NY. He was the first musician to win The BBC Instrumentalist of the year and most recently the first to win the RTE folk instrumentalist of the year. Most recently he received an Honorary Doctor of Music from National University of Ireland Galway.
He founded the seminal Irish American band, The Gloaming, with whom he tours internationally and with whom he shared the prestigious Meteor Prize in 2014 for their debut album.
He and Dennis performed for President Obama and dignitaries both at the White House and the House of Representatives in March, 2011.
Martin was the recipient of six All-Ireland championships before the age of nineteen and spent his youth playing in his late father, P.Joe Hayes’ Tulla Celi Band, which has now been together for more than 70 years.
My Media
- Website: http://www.martinhayes.com
- Twitter: MHayesmusic
- Instagram: martinhayes_musician
Click to Listen on Spotify
- (album/podcast 1): http://open.spotify.com/album/0kA4OpiO0iYJ0wH5kiejM4
- (album/podcast 2): http://open.spotify.com/album/3zpOzh4VaRf66sNWggmgks
- (album/podcast 3): http://open.spotify.com/album/608ZQ0B9bYpnfIMmgbIN7w
- (album/podcast 4): http://open.spotify.com/album/1GSKsqtcxCIGCkzPl69hgm
- (album/podcast 5): http://open.spotify.com/album/45zmNf11g8EYKMJl4FrXqe
More
-
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
“In the decades to come, we’ll surely talk of having seen this man in the way others talk of Miles Davis or Jimi Hendrix or John Coltrane.”
— The Irish Times
Sprawled across broad equatorial latitudes...
Stoked and steamed and sensual in the widest sense of the word...
Limned in cadenced song...
The Recôncavo is a smile inside an irony wrapped in a conundrum.
► The matrix originated as an extension of a record shop opened to divulge the little known music of the people of the Recôncavo and sertão of Bahia, Brazil (per this interview with David Dye for U.S. National Public Radio and hence a sugarcane cutter as our logo), along with other great Brazilian music.
► But in order to provide pathways from around the world to these largely unknown artists, the matrix has to do likewise for all artists everywhere.
