Martin Hayes & The Common Ground Ensemble
Vicar Street, Dubin
★★★★★
The difference in dynamic created by Martin Hayes’s latest collective, The Common Ground Ensemble, is a joy to behold. Hayes has long been a musician with an appetite for adventure. Never one to rest on his laurels, he’s effortlessly inhabited the intimacy of his duet relationship with the late Dennis Cahill over many decades, balancing it with the pair’s work with The Gloaming and Brooklyn Rider and Hayes’s separate escapades with The Martin Hayes Quartet.
While improvisation has always been a central element in his playing, The Common Ground Ensemble places Hayes in an altogether different context, where he encounters musicians with jazz and modern improvisational affinities, in the form of pianist Cormac McCarthy, cellist Kate Ellis and guitarist Kyle Sanna.
All three are also prolific composers and arrangers in their own right, with spirits of adventure and big hearts that readily match those of Hayes.
Into that mix, he invites concertina, bouzouki and harmonium player Brian Donnellan, a member of the Tulla Céilí Band: an inspired addition to this pentagonal quest for musical adventure.
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It appears that the common ground that binds them is a desire to take these most carefully selected traditional tunes somewhere new, while still retaining their essence and respecting their roots.
McCarthy’s piano plays a central but subtle role in the Common Ground Ensemble. Hayes had already blown a full force gale through preconceptions of what a piano can bring to traditional music in the person of Thomas Bartlett in The Gloaming. Cormac McCarthy’s innate understanding of the tradition and his bold jazz sensibility brings another perspective again to the tunes.
And the melody line remains, as ever, at the heart of Hayes’s journey: though never in an untouchable way. Instead, the ensemble mines the depths of the most elegant tune choices and tune pairings, finding and at times amplifying their inherent dissonance with a shared desire to see where the music takes them.
And that’s where they reach high: Kate Ellis tapping into her affinity for Steve Reich in the soothing and shearing repetitive rhythms she brings to Garrett Barry’s jig, which follows Kyle Sanna’s funky undertow and McCarthy’s muted but unquestionably cinematic sweep through Carolan’s Farewell to music. The mood is positively punk, deliriously jagged edged and euphoric in equal measure.
Brian Donnellan’s bouzouki at times plays a similar role to Dennis Cahill’s guitar, weaving in between Hayes’s cut glass bow hand to colour and shade in a minimalist way, and his ability to swing from hard-core tradition to a more loping accompaniment bears testament to his deep-seated musicianship.
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Their inclusion of a raft of Peadar Ó Riada compositions, and in particular of Cá bhfuil an solas? (Where is the light) was particularly apposite, its timely question not wasted on the rapt audience. Hayses’s admission that when a tune is lying around in his head for too long, there’s no knowing what he’s going to do with it, summed up the evening: unpredictable, richly textured, at times delirious and so, so full of heart.
