Trad/World music percussionist, Tommy Hayes, is some character. An intricate texturist on a baffling variety of instruments, he is linked with another great traditional arranger, composer, consummate accompanist and didgeridoo-player, Steve Cooney. Hayes first encountered Cooney when he saw the barefoot Irish-Australian with a didgeridoo at a Ballisodare folk festival long ago, and inducted him into Stockton's Wing.

Last night Hayes played with Ronan Browne, Kevin Glackin, Conall O Grada and Mary Greene at the Island: Arts From Ireland Festival at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. There, he is also teaching schoolchildren in a Virtual Schools project run by DCU, and taking in schools in Derry, Enniskillen, Galway and Kilnamartra.

He flies back into Ireland tonight, then heads out tomorrow on a Music Network tour with another lad from the Wing, banjo-man Ciaran Hanrahan; Galway box-player, Mary Staunton; and Michael Rooney's deft young concertina and harp. But watch what will crawl out of Hayes's bodhran case. "It holds 11 drums," says Tommy, "all interlocked together: Egyptian ones, or traditional ones in various tunings, and I'd take djembes, but when the stuff is fairly straight ahead trad, I wouldn't take Tibetan singing bowls or anything like that."

You should listen to Hayes's last solo album from a couple of years ago, the beautifully eccentric A Room in the North. Tapping rhythms out of everything from bodhrans and flagstones, Hayes guested Browne, kora-inspired harpist Julia Haines, jazzman Ken Edge, and another oldtime collaborator, Hayes's octagenarian aunt, Meta, and her inspirational didles.

Sadly, Meta has passed away since. Tommy: "She always lived her life the way she wanted to, you know? At the drop of a hat, she'd head for a Fleadh, whatever was going. In her 80s, she'd be lying in the bed saying `oh I'm really sick', and next thing she'd be up and out the door. Oh, some character, that one. I won't go into the stories

"Meta'd never been in a studio before, but she just sat in there and blasted away for the whole afternoon. I think I've about three or four hours on tape. We actually did a couple of gigs together, which were wonderful. She would never remember what tune she was supposed to be doing, and always did something totally different"

A good-humoured 46-year-old, with his west-of-the-Shannon accent, Hayes grew up in Kildimo near Limerick. "My mum played the box and a cousin played the bodhran, but I was more interested in Santana's Caravanserai."

At 18, he went to London where a cousin was married to "an English bassplayer, Roger Nicholson, and he kind of re-introduced me to Irish music." When Hayes came back, "I was only playing the spoons, but in 1974, Johnny McDonagh - Johnny Ringo - won the All-Ireland with the bodhran, and I got really enamoured with it, and won it the following year."

He joined Stockton's Wing in 1977, but left in 1983. "It was heading towards a rockier feel, and I didn't think, dynamically, that the drummer and a bass worked with the bodhran. I never felt that rock and Irish music were compatible anyway."

He then went to the US for six years, and hooked up with Irish jazz flautist Brian Dunning. The pair toured the US as Puck Fair, with a number of jazz pianists and guitarists, including at one stage, Micheal O Domhnaill. It cemented Hayes's enduring interest in jazz.

On Hayes's relentlessly inventive album of 1991, An Ras - featuring Alisdair Fraser's heartbreaking fiddle and Micheal O Suilleabhain

at his best - Dunning deconstructs a Paddy Fahy jig. "First and primarily, Brian's a jazz musician," says Hayes. "But he's an Irish jazz musician, so he has the rhythm in his bones. Also, Paddy Fahy's tunes are different from your run-of-the-mill Irish tunes: a lot of minor keys, and very interesting melodic movements. He lends himself to improvisation - he'd probably kill me for saying this, but in some ways, he has a real jazz feel to him.

"And Tommy Potts improvised all other the place. He was hated for it, but it's wonderful stuff. But I think a lot of trad musicians, playing jazz, need a thorough understanding of that idiom before they can improvise. It's different for percussionists. In Irish music, percussion is very simple, so you start moving into different spheres. I often think of the bodhran as similar to the tabla, it's the way you tend to follow the melody, and I would do the same thing in a jazz context."

His music also veers often into, say, 48-beat Nubian handclaps, but he says: "I read music very badly. I can make myself do it, say, if I'm doing a session with an orchestra or something."

He composes by ear with his "little 16-track demo thing, or if I get an idea on the road, I sing it into this little DAT machine. Basically, I get a melody in my head, then it takes me four months to figure it out on the piano. My 10-year-old figures out the left-hand parts. He's a far better piano player than I am."

Judging by the performances he conjures up from his fellow musicians, Hayes is a witchdoctor, always experimenting with chicken shakers, bones, didgeridoos, dumbeqs, darrabukkas, jew's harps, egg shakers, water drums. "I'm an awful man for when somebody is going off on holidays, asking them to bring me back something. Just lately now, there's a girl up the road here who's got a friend in New York who studies the Brazilian martial arts, the capoiera. They have this instrument, the berimbau which is like a bow and arrow, but with a piano wire on it, a single string with a gourd. You play it with a stick and a coin and a shaker in one hand."

He and his wife, Anita, have two young "boyos" of 10 and eight, and live on their nine-acre plot in east Co Clare, with an orchard of 400 trees, many propagated from cuttings, grafted onto old root stock. "We do get to eat some lovely apples around here."

They also have a broad-leaf plantation of 2,000 new-planted, native sessile oak, ash and witch elm; and a seed garden with about 30 native-Irish cabbages. "It's a different process to a food garden, letting everything go to seed. You see the whole life-cycle of the plant."

Last year, Anita won a UN award for her work with the Irish Seed-savers Association. They have about 1,000 members, with 250 actively growing seeds. At the moment things are quiet, as they're between FAS schemes.

Meanwhile, in between gigging and recording, Tommy keeps teaching: in the East Clare Music School or summer schools like Blas. He's now looking to do a Masters degree in music therapy in the University of Limerick.

"I'm fascinated by the link between music and healing, how you can change people's moods. I did a project with Rehab last year with 16-20 young adults who were handicapped mentally and physically. They were on a training course, but this was widening the thing out for them. We ended up recording a scurrilous rap song about all the bosses. But it got me interested in working with psychiatric and geriatric and disabled people. Sure, at least it'll keep me off the streets . . . "

Tommy Hayes will be joined on the Music Network/ESB Best of Irish tour, May 21st-29th, by Mary Staunton (singer/accordion), Kieran Hanrahan (banjo) and Michael Rooney (harp/concertina). Information: 016719429