Martin Hayes, virtuosic Irish fiddler, and one of the most significant talents in Irish traditional music will return to Australia in February 2026.
Martin’s special sound, his mastery of his chosen instrument – the violin – his acknowledgement of the past and his shaping of the future of the music, combine to create a formidable artistic intelligence. Martin Hayes’ soulful interpretations of traditional Irish music are recognised the world over for their exquisite musicality and irresistible rhythm. Praised by the Irish Times as a musician with an “insatiable appetite for adventure”, Martin is the founder of the musical supergroup The Gloaming, (with whom he tours internationally and with whom he shared the prestigious Meteor Prize in 2014 for their debut album), The Common Ground Ensemble, and The Martin Hayes Quartet. Martin toured and recorded with the late guitarist Dennis Cahill for over twenty years. They performed for President Obama at The White House in 2011.
Martin has created collaborations with extraordinary musicians in the classical, folk and contemporary music worlds with the likes of Bill Frisell, Ricky Skaggs, Jordi Savall, Brooklyn Rider and the RTE Concert Orchestra, as well as many of the greatest traditional Irish musicians over the past forty years. Martin has contributed music, both original and traditional arrangements to modern dance, theatre, film and television. He has performed on stage with musicians such as Sting and Paul Simon, and has recorded with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project.
On this forthcoming Australian tour Martin will be accompanied by Kyle Sanna. Hailed as a “first rate” and “versatile” musician by The New Yorker, guitarist and composer Sanna performs traditional Irish music as well as jazz and improvised music, composing for ensembles, and producing recordings for many artists.
Kyle Sanna has collaborated with and performed alongside modern virtuosos like Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer, and with some of the greatest living interpreters of the Irish tradition. Together Hayes and Sanna will transform long-revered melodies into pathways for profound emotional experiences. Fostering connection between melody and human spirit, Hayes strips away musical pretence, revealing how traditional tunes can become vehicles for personal revelation.
Ahead of his February 2026 Australian tour along with guitarist Kyle Sanna, acclaimed Irish fiddler/composer Martin Hayes chatted with Australian Musician’s Greg Phillips
MORE ABOUT THE INTERVIEW
For Irish fiddle master Martin Hayes, music has never been an academic pursuit or a structured discipline. It has always been something lived, absorbed and felt. Raised in a deeply musical family in East County Clare, he learned traditional music “environmentally,” he says, not through theory or formal training, but through the natural osmosis of sound that shaped his childhood. That foundation continues to define the essence of Hayes’ playing today, which is instinctive, emotional and rooted in an ancient cultural soil.
Reflecting on his upbringing, Hayes admits he likely wouldn’t be the musician he is had he not grown up in that environment. Structured learning never held his attention, school was something to get through. Music, however, existed outside those confines, as a realm of freedom that he could pursue entirely on his own terms. It taught him early on that creativity lives in the tension between intellectual understanding and the intangible inner world where performance truly happens. That tension, he believes, is present in every musician, the battle between control and surrender, knowledge and expression.
This perspective fuels his deep appreciation of traditional and indigenous music forms everywhere. He sees folk traditions as grounded and accessible, tied to community, nature, everyday life, “reliably human,” as he puts it. It’s one of the reasons Australia has always struck him so profoundly. On his first visits, what seemed at first like a familiar Western society slowly revealed the powerful presence of its Indigenous culture. He describes the feeling not as one of knowledge or expertise, but of sensing something ancient and close beneath the surface, an energy he relates to how he feels standing on the west coast of Ireland or the Aran Islands. “Maybe as musicians, we’re sensitive to that sort of thing,” he reflects.
Hayes returns to Australia in February with Kyle Sanna for performances built around the Common Ground Ensemble’s album Peggy’s Dream. Though the record provides the backbone of the set, Hayes expects that the music will evolve during the tour. His partnership with Sanna is a natural fit, the American guitarist and composer draws from jazz, classical, experimental and traditional music with equal fluency. Hayes relishes working with someone capable of shifting between so many worlds. “He has so many things he can bring to the table,” he says. “That’s exciting.”
The same sense of openness guided Hayes in past collaborations, including his enlightening experience touring with jazz icon Bill Frisell. What Hayes expected to be a structured rehearsal process became instead a lesson in embracing spontaneity. Frisell approached each day as a blank slate, making Hayes realise the concert would unfold freely, unpredictably and beautifully every night. It was, he says, a true education.
Despite decades on stage, Hayes still approaches each performance with the same lofty goal, that it will be the best he has ever played. He strives for a night where every note feels euphoric and transcendent, a peak rarely reached in full, but always worth chasing. Even now, nerves can creep in, after the long pandemic break he experienced stage fright for the first time in his life and had to slowly rebuild that inner connection to performing.
When asked about career highlights, Hayes resists the idea of defining moments. Playing for Barack Obama, performing at the Sydney Opera House, these were significant occasions, but they are different from musical highs, which can arrive anywhere, anytime, unpredictably. His life in music, he says, is “a blur of gigs,” like daily swims, some better than others, but all part of the same long practice.
His current touring fiddle, a mysterious instrument with an uncertain origin, came into his life almost by accident twenty years ago in Chicago. After struggling with instruments that were too bright, too warm, or too sensitive to humidity, Hayes stumbled upon a violin in a shop while waiting for Dennis Cahill. He loved it immediately. Without even knowing its price, he traded his existing fiddle for it on the spot and has played it ever since. Its unclear pedigree doesn’t worry him. “It doesn’t matter if it sounds good.”
As for recording, Hayes’ next project is a new orchestral version of Peggy’s Dream, arranged by members of the Common Ground Ensemble, Sanna, cellist Kate Ellis, and pianist Cormac McCarthy, all accomplished composers and orchestrators. Hayes feels fortunate to work with musicians who can not only perform but reimagine music at that level.
In the studio, he favours a natural, unforced approach to capturing the fiddle, playing without headphones where possible, using ribbon microphones, valve preamps and a warm-sounding room that feels good physically as well as sonically.
Having lived much of his adult life outside Ireland, Hayes sees Irish traditional music now with the perspective of distance. Rather than viewing it as the centre of the world, easy to do when one lives within it, he understands it as one thread in a vast global tapestry of culture. That mindset shapes his approach to reinterpreting traditional tunes, tradition is not fixed, he says, but always evolving, always adapting to new hands, new ears, new contexts.
And few musicians embody that evolution more gracefully than Martin Hayes, a player who balances ancestral memory with restless curiosity, who listens as deeply as he plays, and who continues, after all these years, to search for that transcendent night where every note glows.
AUSTRALIAN TOUR FEBRUARY 2026
Presented by Gaynor Crawford and Destroy All Lines
Tickets on sale Now
Thu 19 Perth Festival
https://www.perthfestival.com.au/
Sat 21 Theatre Royal Castlemaine (MATINEE SHOW)
Sat 21 Theatre Royal Castlemaine (EVENING SHOW)
GP Link: https://tickets.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/43fa7932-67d2-4bdf-83f0-532e8c974630
Tue 24 Recital Centre Melbourne
GP Link: https://www.melbournerecital.com.au/whats-on/current-productions/martin-hayes
Wed 25 The Concourse Chatswood, Sydney
GP Link: https://aucentury.sales.ticketsearch.com/sales/salesevent/153613
Thu 26 Powerhouse Brisbane
GP Link: Martin Hayes tickets | Brisbane Powerhouse | Ticketek Australia
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