EIF: Martin Hayes and the Common Ground Ensemble

Leith Theatre - 16/08/22

Martin Hayes’s last appearance in Edinburgh was in February 2020 before the world stopped. On that occasion he appeared solo and ran through a largely unplanned set of favourite tunes, some of them even suggested by the audience. There was a bit more formality about this concert for the Edinburgh International Festival, with a new five-piece band, The Common Ground Ensemble, reminiscent of his previous project, The Gloaming. The formality only extended to the music, however, as Hayes affably addressed the audience with both wit and wisdom, for example explaining his philosophy, shared with the legendary whistle player, Micho Russell, of unnecessary notes. 

The opening number, the slow air, ‘Bright Vision’ gave us a taste of what to expect. Hayes himself stated the melody with minimal support from cellist, Kate Ellis, before dropping out to leave Ellis and pianist, Cormac McCarthy in some tasteful interplay. This duet then ceded to the solo piano with an improvisation round the melody, Debussy-like cadences hinting at one of the interesting threads of the project, a modernist musical sensibility combined with the melodic inventiveness and depth of the Irish tradition. Or indeed the Scottish tradition, as Hayes mused on the constant musical exchange which has fed the repertoire of the music of both countries. 

The Common Ground Ensemble gives Hayes and his musicians a chance to stretch out and depart from the tunes on occasion. The tunes, however, are what lie at the heart of the enterprise, and the history of all of Hayes’s work is the story of his quest to do justice to these melodies, ‘simple and obvious’, as he put it, but ‘elusive’. The journey from the slow, sensuous beginnings of an air, or a reel played at half-speed through to the final display of speed and intensity is now familiar to any fan of Martin Hayes. You know where he’s going. The thrill as ever is in accompanying him and his musicians as they negotiate the journey.