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(2023) Martin Hayes & The Common Ground Ensemble - Peggy's Dream [FLAC]
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(2023) Martin Hayes & The Common Ground Ensemble - Peggy's Dream
Review:
…Music is rarely as rewarding as you’ll find on Martin Hayes & the Common Ground Ensemble’s album Peggy’s Dream to be. The Common Ground Ensemble’s line-up is, in addition to Martin on fiddle, Cormac McCarthy (piano, ‘Cottage Evolution’), Kate Ellis (cello, Artistic Director of Crash Ensemble), Kyle Sanna (guitar, a collaborator with Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile) and Brian Donnellan (bouzouki/harmonium/concertina, and, like Martin, an alumnus of The Tulla Ceìiliì Band). Whilst from different musical backgrounds, they each have connections to Irish music – their common ground. Martin has talked of him shaping the “mood, feeling, harmonies and overall arrangement” of the tunes for the Ensemble, which they “then collectively fill out”. A gentle piano refrain leads in the first tune, The Boyne Water, belying it being a march, which soon becomes apparent when Martin’s fiddle takes up the melody, though the playing remains light and airy in the first half. The fiddle briefly drops out as piano and cello build to a swell, inviting in a fuller, majestic fiddle passage, then what sounds like just bouzouki and piano, and finally piano alone, gradually and softly fading to a stop. Much of what makes Martin Hayes such a unique musician is his ability to take a familiar tune and arrange it in a uniquely fresh way whilst retaining its very essence, the core of the traditional melody. The Longford Tinker is a reel familiar to some from the storming version on the Bothy Band’s first (1975) album. If so, leave all preconceptions at the door. The tune begins as if we are on a fast-moving train, with a sense of urgency, the melody played on fiddle weaving in and out of the rattling, staccato rhythm, the concertina then doing the same. It builds as the piano joins, and the tune becomes more familiar, and in the final section, accelerates, leaving concertina and fiddle in tandem, as if there is time to make up on the journey. It is an exhilarating reimagining that picks you up and carries you along. Garrett Barry’s Jig is approached by Martin and the Ensemble in a highly original, stimulating way. Kate Ellis’s Crash Ensemble experimental background comes to the fore on her exploratory cello opening. This, and what sounds like plucked piano strings, sets an unsettled, eerie tone that runs beneath throughout the tune. The fiddle eases in over sweeping bowed cello and piano, which sound almost disconnected from the melody. There’s no mistaking Johnny Cope, a hornpipe played with a much straighter bat that fizzes with real verve and has echoes of the vibrant version recorded by Sliabh Luachra fiddler Pádraig O’Keeffe in 1949. It is played in a set with Hughie Travers’ Reel, which has an arrangement that is happily reminiscent of The Gloaming, with Kyle Sana’s rhythmic sparring guitar and sparing, striking piano from Cormac McCarthy. Gentle starts, with gradual shifts in pace, can often be found in Martin’s projects. Caì Bhfuil An Solas originally featured on the second Triúr album Triúr Arís from 2012 (a group Martin was in with Peadar Ó Riada and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh). It is a jig written by Peadar, but as you might expect, barely recognisable as such to begin with. Drifting piano and then fiddle, picking intermittently at the melody, feels like waking up to beautiful music being played outside an open window. It proceeds slowly, with lots of space and without any added complications, and although it increases in pace as it goes along, it never becomes hurried; the effect is quite hypnotic. The rendition of the waltz Aisling Gheal is notably uncluttered; it has a gorgeous slow beginning on fiddle, with only finespun piano and a dash of cello; it is one of the most beautiful pieces of music you’ll hear in a long time. Martin Hayes has always talked about and been true to his musical and familial roots in East Clare. Those associations, and of different kinds, can be found dotted about the album. It is partially dedicated to the memory of Martin’s mother, Peggy. The tune that gives the album its title, Peggy’s Dream, is an air/lament from the rich well that is the Goodman Collection. It is played exquisitely by Martin, supported by a rolling plucked cello and similarly subtle contributions on guitar and piano. The melody is handed on mid-tune to Brian Donnellan’s concertina, which further enhances the contemplative tenderness of the ensemble’s playing. The Glen of Aherlow is another widely played tune. A reel composed by Tipperary-born fiddle Sean Ryan. It has a gentle, enticing arrangement; halfway in, floating piano lines come to the fore, ushering in an ethereal, dream-like trading of the melody between the players, swirling away over the final few bars like smoke drifting into the sky from a chimney. The Hayes connection is that the tune was on one of the earliest LPs of Irish traditional music and the first of East Clare fiddle playing, originally titled ‘All-Ireland Champions – Violin: meet Paddy Canny & P.J. Hayes’, and first released in 1959. P.J. was Martin’s dad, and Martin tells the story in the sleeve notes he wrote for the 2001 CD reissue of that album – of how his dad and Paddy Canny grew up together playing fiddle and how the recording, with Peadar O’Loughlin on flute and Bridie Lafferty on piano, was made. On the LP, the tune was called Lafferty’s in honour of Bridie. The album’s final track, Toss The Feathers/The Magerabaun Reel, has one more personal, East Clare connection. “It’s an old tune that I didn’t have any title for that was played by two local musicians, Joe Bane and Bill Malley who were both from the townland of Magherabaun, so I called it the Magherabaun Reel in their memory”. Martin has recorded Joe Bane’s Reel a few times, and Bill Malley’s Barndance is the glorious first tune on Martin’s 1995 album Under the Moon. Toss The Feathers, one of the best-known reels in the tradition, kicks off with familiar animated fiddle from Martin and bouncy, cadenced guitar accompaniment. The piano arrives surreptitiously and, not long after, shifts into a dazzling funky, jazzy piano extemporisation before going into The Magerabaun Reel, which builds to a breathtaking, triumphant finale. If it sounds like you’ve never heard anything like it, that’s because you haven’t. While Peggy’s Dream builds on what went before, there are some passing resemblances to The Gloaming in passages, the musical palette Martin has assembled, and the resulting soundscape, is as different, with cello and concertina, as it is similar, with fiddle, guitar and piano. The cello offers the sharpest departure as many of Kate Ellis’s contributions add a variety of quirky underpinnings and flourishes, all of which sound like they belong. Brian Donnellan’s concertina brings a strong, pleasing traditional East Clare sensibility threaded through many of the tunes, often playing the melodies in league with Martin’s fiddle; all the while, Cormac McCarthy and Kyle Sanna add enhancing, intuitive light and shade. — by Dave McNally @ folkradio.co.uk
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