Draiocht

Lá Fhéile Pádraig! Growing up in England, my brother and sister were 'musical' in the sense that they could hear something on the radio and pick out the melody on the family piano. Not me. For me making music was hard work and I lacked any sort of motivation or encouragement to put in the effort. My folks paid for piano lessons when I announced that I wanted to learn guitar like the Beatles. That was about the level of it. At 18 I left home and country, and baggage, to go to College in Dublin. One of the first things I did was buy a tin whistle and start listening to Trad. That was partly happenstance and party conscious choice. The bands of the 70s: Silly Wizard, Planxty, Horslips, The Bothy Band - I could hum along to that stuff with or without them. But life moved on, I didn't keep up with Trad as it developed through the turn of the century

At the birth of The Blob, The Gloaming rose up above my horizon, especially the urgent visceral sean nós [Saoirse] of Iarla Ó Lionáird [Is do thugas gean mo chroí go fíochmhar¹]. While listening, yet again, to a Gloaming set on YT, I fluttered down through the comments to find that Martin Hayes, Gloaming fiddler from East Clare, had published an interim autobiography Shared Notes: A Musical Journey (2021). I'll have that, I said, and asked Dau.I The Librarian to lift their copy off the shelf at Coolock when I was last in Dublin: that visit was for the stamps, like.

For me the book starts off on the wrong foot - along the back-roads of East Clare between Feakle and Tulla. Pretty much the last time we were there, to repatriate the ashes of my dear dead friend Kevin, it was so bleak as to be tragic. That's my baggage, not yours, though. Read on to see where Kevin's neighbour Martin Hayes finished up.

Exec Summ: Martin's father PJ played fiddle for the Tulla Céilí Band and Martin grew up in the company of older men who lived trad. The Chap tried and failed college and politics and commerce; tried drink and drugs and came through the other side; lived the undocumented diaspora in Chicago. All the while he put in the hours with his fiddle to find Truth in Music and shared the notes with increasingly large audiences including Presidents Obama and Higgins. Clare boy done good. Some points

• the rehearsal may be better than the performance b/c pressure
• the studio fails to capture the Draiocht - that evanescent, magic moment
• most jam sessions in the pub or kitchen fail to capture the moment
• to be There, Then, When, you have to be present at A Lot of sessions
• when the dove settles, you will know it
  
• find your true voice and be true to it
• nobody gains if you play what you think the audience expects to hear
  
• teaching can reveal a truth ignored or discounted

And finally a hats off tribute to mortality. Dennis Cahill, the Gloaming guitarist, and Martin's collaborator and co-performer for 30+ years was born, in Chicago, the day before me and he died 20 Jun 2022. The ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩ lives on.

¹To furiously give the affection of my heart