Hayes combines apples and music for new CD

PERCUSSIONIST Tommy Hayes is creating waves with the release of a new double DVD/CD set, which records the life cycle of the apple through the seasons, while chronicling the apple in music.

Tommy admits that when he told one of the participants about this project she remarked, “only you would put together a concert about apples”, which he reveals is “probably true”.
Entitled Apples in Winter, the Feakle resident says he had been interested in doing something like this for a while and having successfully applied for Deis funding, he was able to put his idea into motion.
“I’m mad into apples and into music and I always thought it would be an interesting thing to do. This was the first time I got an arts proposal accepted. I think it was the link between music and agriculture and linking the two together that they grasped. It was something that had never been done before,” he explains.
Tommy’s musical background is in percussion, having started in 1976/77 with Stockton’s Wing. He then moved to the States but returned home, freelancing for about 10 years. After being involved in music full time for about 27 years, he returned to get a masters in music therapy and is now working in that field. He is currently doing a fellowship with Bristol University in another form of music therapy and hasn’t ruled out the possibility of doing a PhD.
Tommy and his wife Anita came to Clare 14 years ago, where Anita founded the Irish Seed Savers Association in Scariff and this is where Tommy’s initial interest in apples began.
“My wife founded Seed Savers, so I got dragged into it. When we started looking for the old apple varieties, the first apple variety was a variety called the Ballyvaughan seedling and so I wanted to make a link to the Ballyvaughan seedling for this project.
“When I got the grant, I got onto Fergus Tighe in Ennistymon. He’s a film maker and I gave him a brief to spend a year in the orchard. It started in the Ballyvaughan seedling orchard, which is an old derelict orchard and then we went through all the different seasons of the year in the Irish Seed Savers orchard, from grafting, to bud, to fruit, to leaves, to apples. When that was done, Fergus and I put together a one-hour long silent film,” Tommy explains.
In the meantime, Tommy had been researching music associated with apples in the trad archives in Dublin, spending nearly an entire summer there. He was also thinking of who would perform on the DVD/CD.
“I got the musicians I wanted. I got them all together and gave them all the music. I think we only had three rehearsals. I knew I was dealing with professionals so it makes life so much easier. Basically, I wanted it to be a continuous piece so there were no breaks. That took a lot of work to figure out what went where. I’d given the musicians a lot of material and we picked the ones that people liked to sing. The pieces were all researched from the archives and I merged them together. Some of them had no melody initially. One of them, Jesus Christ the Apple Tree, dated back to the 12th century and I put an old 12th century traditional melody to it. I also found a piece from the 1850s, which had no music so the piano player wrote a melody for it so there was composing involved as well. One of the pieces had started out as a traditional piece but had gone to America and become a country piece, so we got Mary Frances Keenan to sing it as a country piece,” the musician adds.
Further filming took place in Glór, where the group played three concerts in the one day, two in front of live audiences, which formed further footage for the film.
“Reaction has been good, so far people like it. When you start watching the DVD it is like a meditation on the whole thing. It’s nearly an hour long. There are two pieces of footage, one of the concert and one of the orchard and there is an audio CD of the music as well,” Tommy outlines.
Tommy is also giving back to Ireland’s native apples by ensuring that 60% of the proceeds from the DVD/CD go back to the Irish Seed Savers Association. This, Tommy hopes, will help to clear the mortgage.
“My feeling on it is that bad times are coming and it would be good not to have any encumbrance on the land over there and keep the people free and clear. There are 140 varieties of apple trees there now. When we started it there was only one commercially available and now there are 700 varieties of vegetables. The whole idea for us, Anita in particular, was that Ireland was losing its indigenous foods. We have managed to stem the tide but there are still things out there that we haven’t found. We have done most of the collecting. The next step is to build a proper gene bank and that’s going to happen soon. Then the step after that is to get people growing the stuff,” he stresses.
The CD/DVD features Dublin piano player and singer Carl Corcoran, Waterford singer Karen Casey, Michelle Mulcahy from Abbeyfeale in Limerick on concertina, harp and fiddle, Ennis country singer Mary Frances Keenan and Mick O’Brien from Dublin on pipes and whistle. Modern dancer Cindy Cummins offers her interpretation through dance.
Following the release of his album, Almost Home last year, Tommy revealed he has just started writing again but is in no hurry to bring out another one just yet, having spent three years working on Apples in Winter. The double CD/DVD is available in music shops and online at www.irishseedsavers.ie.
Asked where he will go to from here Tommy replies, “I’ll do the spuds next”.
“It’s been fascinating and I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s been very different from recording with somebody or writing an album or even writing stuff,” he concludes.