Martin Hayes: In Residence

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 including Bill Frisell, Ricky Skaggs, Jordi Savall, Brooklyn Rider and the Irish Chamber Orchestra, as well as many of the greatest 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 curator for the Marble Sessions at the Kilkenny ArtsFestival. Martin has been recognized as Musician of the Year (Gradam Ceol) from TG4, Irish language television; and Person of the Year by the Irish Arts Center and the American Irish Historical Society, both based in New York City. 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 the St. Patrick’s Day festivities for President Obama and dignitaries both at the White House and 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.   

Dennis Cahill is considered one of the world's finest guitarists in traditional Irish music. His unique playing, accompaniment, and arranging are acknowledged as a major breakthrough for guitar in the Irish tradition. He has played for presidents and prime ministers. “Brilliant” (NPR) and “crucial” (Folk Roots UK) are some of the descriptions of his spare, essential playing.

Dennis is perhaps best known in his long musical partnership with Irish fiddler Martin Hayes. Of the acclaimed duo, The Irish Times wrote, “Starting out as players with considerable talent, they've metamorphosed into musicians of unconscionable virtuosity. They play with a concord and an affinity that most musicians lust after, but few ever acquire.” (Siobhan Long)  Dennis is also a founding member of The Gloaming, a new Irish supergroup who has astounded critics and audiences alike, winning the 2014 Meteor Choice Prize (Ireland's “Grammy”) for their debut album.

Dennis Cahill was born June 16, 1954 in Chicago, Illinois to immigrant parents from County Kerry, Ireland. Displaying a keen interest in music from childhood, he started studying guitar at nine years of age. He subsequently studied the instrument at the highly regarded Chicago Music College, training under Howard Levy, Manuel Lopez Ramos, Steve Klein and Robert Becker. As his career progressed, he recorded with many acclaimed Irish traditional music practitioners (including Kevin Burke, Liz Carroll, Seamus Egan, P.J. Hayes, Eileen Ivers, Arty McGlynn, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Liam O’Flynn, and Jimmy Keane), and has appeared in concert halls and festivals throughout the USA, Europe, China, and Australia.

Dennis met traditional fiddle player Martin Hayes in Chicago in the 1980s. In the early '90s Dennis and Martin again teamed up, this time forming one of Irish music's most acclaimed duos of all time. Their concerts have become legendary. Their touring schedule has taken them to Australia, Japan, Europe, the U.K., Ireland, the US, Canada, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Poland, India, and Mexico City.

Dennis and Martin have collaborated or played with such artists as Sting, jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, Grammy-winning bluegrass and country star Ricky Skaggs, newgrass artists Darol Anger and Mike Marshall, and the Irish Chamber Orchestra.  They've appeared in Australia, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, Holland, Scandinavia, Canada, the U.K., and Ireland as well as stops in Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China, Poland, and Mexico. In 2011 they were the featured performers at the White House for President and Mrs. Obama, the Vice-President, and the President of Ireland.  With The Gloaming, they performed in Brussels in 2013 to celebrate Ireland’s Presidency of the European Union, and in 2014 at London's Royal Albert Hall for the historic first state visit by the Irish President.

In 2011 Dennis helped form The Gloaming, a new Irish "supergroup" which has transfixed music fans in Ireland and around the world. The Gloaming's debut self-titled CD won Ireland's highest music award in 2015, the Meteor Choice Music Prize, and landed on many best-of year lists including The Guardian and NPR, NPR described it's "abundant virtuosity and sheer beauty...the rare album that might well transform the syntax of a whole style.”  The Gloaming, which also features celebrated Irish sean-nos singer Iarla O Lionaird (Afro Celt Sound System),  New York downtown pianist Thomas Bartlett, and Irish fiddler Caoimhin Ó Raghallaigh, has been selling out major concert halls from the Dublin National Hall to the Sydney Opera House to Mexico City's Teatro de la Ciudad.

Dennis also appears each August at the Masters of Tradition Festival held in August each year at Bantry House in Bantry, West Cork, where Ireland’s most distinguished traditional musicians are invited to play in an exquisite chamber music setting.

One of the prominent voices on the mandolin in Irish music, Marla Fibish brings a brings a deep and distinctive sensibility to the music on one of its lesser heard instruments. Her dynamic playing is featured on the 2017 Noctambule release A Sweetish Tune, the 2010 eponymous recording with the San Francisco based trio Three Mile Stone, with fiddler Erin Shrader and guitarist Richard Mandel, and The Morning Star, a duo CD with legendary Irish singer and bouzouki player Jimmy Crowley released in 2011, an all instrumental project that features Irish music on an array of mandolin-family instruments: mandolin, mandola, mandocello, bouzouki, and dordan.

In addition to the mandolin, Marla plays mandola, tenor guitar, and button accordion. She sings and writes music and is known for her musical settings of works from a variety of poets. This work is featured in the duo project Noctambule, a rich collaboration with her husband, guitarist Bruce Victor. Marla and Bruce released their debut CD together, Travel in the Shadows, in 2013, and followed it up in 2015 with The Waking. Both recordings feature poetry that they have set to music and arranged for their bevy of strings, as well as a few original tunes—waltzes, a reel and an air. In July of 2017, Noctambule released a new recording, A Sweetish Tune. This album is largely traditional Irish music, with some newer tunes written in traditional forms, by Marla and by others, along with a few lovingly chosen songs.

"Some of the best mandolin playing in Irish music.”
—Dennis Cahill, Guitarist 

"Marla is a wonder on the mandolin; rhythmic beyond imagination, clear as a bell tone, great invention, lovely ornaments at just the right times and places, and a sureness and ease that allows the listener to relax and be carried away."
—Kevin Carr, Folkworks

Nic Gareiss is a performer, educator, and researcher examining the employment of aesthetic movement as a medium of cultural meaning-making. Informed by 20 years of ethnographic study and performance of many world percussive dance traditions, Gareiss' choreographic work draws from many percussive dance traditions to weave together a dance technique facilitating his love of improvisation, traditional dance footwork vocabulary, and musical collaboration. He has concertized internationally for over ten years with many of the luminaries of traditional Irish and American folk music and presented his research at academic conferences internationally. Gareiss' MA thesis based upon ethnographic work with Irish LGBT competitive step dancers was the first piece of scholarship to query the experience of sexual minorities within Irish dance. His present research seeks to illuminate discursive formations of national identity, gender and sexual orientation via ethnography and embodied practice.

Hailing from a musical family in Portlaoise, Ireland, Tríona Marshall began studying harp at age seven. Her natural talent led her to receive tuition under Aileen McArdle and by age eighteen, she began a four-year degree at Koninklijk Conservatorium in Den Haag studying under Professor Edward Witsenburg. Tríona undertook her postgraduate studies at London’s Royal College of Music, under the tutelage of Daphne Boden, graduating in 1998.

From this time until 2003, Tríona was principal harpist with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. Highlights from this period include numerous performances, television and radio broadcasts of the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo and the Harp Concerto in B-flat by George Freidrich Handel. 

In 2003, a chance ticket to a Martin Hayes concert and a one-off performance with the Chieftains at the BBC Proms in the Park ignited an enduring passion for Irish traditional music, beginning the journey that Triona has been on ever since. Six months after what was intended to be a one-off guest performance with The Chieftains, Tríona was asked back and has been performing with them ever since, engaging in extensive world-wide tours, recording on platinum-selling albums and even receiving an honorary doctorate from DIT in 2013.
 
Tríona’s eponymous first solo album, comprising entirely of Irish traditional music was released in 2006 to critical acclaim. Shortly thereafter, along with fellow Chieftain colleagues Cara Butler, John and Nathan Pilatzke, Tríona recorded an album and performed internationally with the traditional band Tread. As a soloist on the traditional harp, she has played at events such as the opening ceremony of The Special Olympics in Croke Park Stadium, the Festival Mundial de Arpa in Paraguay and The Ninth World Harp Congress.