As the Glasgow-based festival Celtic Connections marks its twenty first year of lighting up winter nights, these words have become synonymous -- synonymous with each other, and with adventures in music that explore the depth and breadth of Celtic music across Scotland and across the globe.

Celtic Connections runs for eighteen days in more than a dozen venues across Glasgow, from the city’s newest performance space, the Hydro, to the restored Georgian era church that its Saint Andrew’s in the Square, to the small concert space at the National Piping Centre, to the historic Old Fruit Market, the classy City Halls, and the always welcoming Royal Glasgow Concert Hall.

Alasdair Fraser and Natalie

With all of this, Celtic Connections is a festival which maintains its welcoming community and family feeling across hundreds of artists sharing their music with thousands of listeners, both through formal concerts and in after hours events including the Festival Club, Late Night Sessions, and the House of Song, which keep the music and the craic going long after the main stages have closed down of an evening. There are workshops and talks during the weekend days, as well, and an open stage most afternoons where up and coming musicians from across Scotland share their music.

Highlights this year include:

Scottish rock band Del Amitri stage a highly anticipated reunion concert at the Hydro.

Ceol’s Craic, always highly anticipated too, is a group of performances featuring Gaelic musicians, this year including Kathleen MacInnes and and Sineag MacIntyre, The Friel Sisters, and others, held in the intimate performance spaces of the The Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Sauchiehall Street.

Americana songwriting, always a strong presence at Celtic Connections, will be represented in separate performances by Beth Nielsen Chapman, Gretchen Peters, Cory Chisel, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Shawn Colvin, among others.

Shawn Colvin

Beth Nielsen Chapman

Connections between Asturias, a Celtic region of northern Spain, and Scotland have long been celebrated at the festival, and this year that includes the launch of the Albastur Cultural Exchange (ACE), a project begun by Scottish fiddler Simon Bradley. who's long worked with top Asturian band Llan de Cubel. It’s meant to encourage active sharing of sounds and traditions between musicians and audiences in both places.

Cherish the Ladies will mark twenty years of Celtic Connections appearances. With ever ebullient founding member and flute player Joanie Madden at the helm, core members of Cherish will be joined by Cherish’s first lead singer, Cathie Ryan, as well Galway balladeers Don Stiffe and Matt Keane, fiddler Nollaig Casey and Donnadgh Gough on bodhran and uilleann pipes, along with world class step dancers for an evening at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.

The Hindustani Classical Music Ensemble seeks to revive ancient choral  music of India, vibrantly interwoven with instrumentation including piano and violin. The Lewis Psalm Singers, from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, focus on an equally historic tradition, in which lines of individual tempo and ornamentation are sung back back line by line by the choir together. The two groups will offer individual performances and then come together what bids to a unique evening in the historic confines of the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery.

Asin Langa

It was thirty years ago that Donald Shaw and Karen Matheson met at school in Oban in Scotland’s west. They are marking three decades of the band Capercaillie, which has taken the music and traditions of Gaelic Scotland across the world. Celebrating the release of their album At the heart of It All, regular band members will be joined in concert at the Royal Concert Hall by former members of the band and many of the album’s guests, including award winning singers Julie Fowlis and Kathleen MacInnes.

All this is just a taste of what will take place at Celtic Connections this year. There’s more information at the Celtic Connections web site, along with ways to find out what events might be broadcast on line should you not be making it to Glasgow.

Face the West

Emily Smith

More Celtic Connections goodness:

Kerry Dexter is Music Editor for Wandering Educators.  You may reach Kerry at music at wanderingeducators dot com

You may find more of Kerry’s work at Music Road, and at Journey to Scotland, Perceptive Travel, Ireland and the Americas, National Geographic Traveler, and other places on line and in print.