There won’t be much in the way of arguments over this gig. There won’t be any bad reviews. The Gloaming – Thomas Bartlett, Dennis Cahill, Martin Hayes, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, and Iarla Ó Lionáird – are five stunningly gifted and diverse musicians and together they are more than the sum of their parts. They are currently playing a music that is so vibrant, emotional and elemental that to fail to be electrified by it would be, I think, to be missing something about what music is.

As they blazed to the end of a twenty-minute opening salvo of tunes, building intelligently from a the rich, meditative sean-nós of ‘An Chuil Daigh Ré’ to the swift, savage, dazzling climax of ‘Tom Doherty’s Reel’, it was all we could do not to howl with joy; some did. Michael D was there, and I’m pretty sure I heard him howling too.

The Gloaming are still a new outfit, with barely a recording to their name, but already they are acting as a Rosetta stone for people like me who know little or nothing about Irish traditional music, but feel that ignorance ever more acutely, and want a way in.

Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh is probably the key member of the band for these people; over the last five years he has shown a willingness, even a need, to experiment with form and an ability to speak a language understood by those who have kept themselves at arm’s length from traditional music. He toured with Norman Blake and Euros Childs; he worked with Amiina; that kind of thing. So when he goes back to more classic forms, as he does here and with Martin Hayes in Triúr, we trust him and follow him, because he’s one of us.

In fact, I wrote something in State in 2009, now a bit embarrassing, to the effect that Caoimhín made a refreshing change from regular traditional musicians because his extraordinary 2007 album Where the One-Eyed Man is King did not stick “to the forms handed down like commandments over generations”, as if I even knew what those were. Don’t ask me to tell between a reel and a jig.* I even called Caoimhín “the most singular traditional musician of his generation”, which might imply that I had a list of singular traditional musicians, from which I had carefully chosen him. It wasn’t quite like that.

Still, I was in Vicar St almost solely because of Caoimhín, so he is important if only because he has introduced the odd eejit newbie to The Gloaming’s music, and by extension to the untold wealth of traditional music that’s out there, beckoning.

Martin Hayes, a self-described “adamant traditionalist”, seemed to understand that at least some of the audience was in the newbie camp. He introduced the sparkling reel ‘The Sailor’s Bonnet’ with a brief tutorial on the composition of traditional airs (“not too simple, not too complex”), then began by playing the tune slowly, pointing out its working parts, before the band clicked into gear and, in Hayes’s own words, tore away at it. (More howling.)

Hayes, a legend in traditional music for decades, emerged for me as the de facto leader of the band. He is already established as a brilliant thinker and communicator – his piece in the Journal of Music on 21st century traditional music (http://t.co/0T8x0isq) is vivid and enlightening. Leadership duties here went as far as improvised storytelling to hold the show together during the encore, as Iarla Ó Lionáird went missing backstage in search of lyrics for a song by Peadar Ó Riada from Cúil Aodha (“Has he gone to Cúil Aodha to get them?”)

And it was ultimately striking how little of the pleasure of this show derived from any attempts at experimentation, or reworking, or what one might think of, misguidedly, as some kind of necessary modernisation of this music. The pleasure derived from the sheer beauty of the tunes and the awesome skill with which they were played; from Martin Hayes’s evident bouncing glee, and the stillness that overtook Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh during ‘The Old Bush’ as he appeared to play without touching his violin, producing notes so delicate and fluid they sounded to have come straight out of the air; from Thomas Bartlett and Dennis Cahill’s mostly unshowy, subtle accompaniments; and from Iarla Ó Lionáird’s textured, aching singing of ‘Óró, Sé do Bheatha ‘Bhaile’, or ‘Samhradh’, or of the phrase “Ochón, trua”, from “No. 44”, a song of longing for love that might be twenty generations old.

It is an intoxicating thing to find that an entire culture from your own backyard that you have essentially ignored all your life is just sitting there waiting to be feasted on. The music Caoimhín and The Gloaming have re-introduced me to is a music I cannot wait to explore; an ancient music that does not age. Martin Hayes spoke about the music growing and evolving and changing, but never fading, as you live with it, and he has been steeped in this stuff for half a century: “After all this time, it’s better it gets.” Now that’s a thought.
*A reel is a dance tune played in double time (2/2 or 4/4) and a jig is played in triple time (3/2, 3/4, or 3/8)