Rich pickings: Six of the best from Celtic Connections

Celtic Connections was launched in 1994 by Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in a bid to bolster the post-Christmas programming lull.

At the time, many thought it madness, trying to establish a new music festival at that dim time of year when most folk were recovering from festive spending and excess.

Twenty-three years on, it has become the largest winter music festival of its kind anywhere, a spectacularly eclectic, 18-day celebration of roots music from the Celtic world and well beyond.

This year running from 14-31 January the festival will host 2,000 performers playing in some 20 venues across the city centre.

Here are just six stand-out gigs from what can be a bewilderingly diverse programme.

Celtic Connections opening concerts can feature anything from Indo-Celtic fusion to orchestral works.

This year’s, however, touches base with Scotland’s rich musical heritage, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Traditional Music and Song Association which has done much to promote that heritage.

Many of Scotland’s best-known and longstanding traditional singers will assemble for the night – Sheena Wellington, Arthur Johnstone, Barbara Dickson, Kris Drever, the ballad trio Shepheard, Spiers and Watson, the award-winning band Malinky and many others.

The show’s musical director is someone who grew up nurtured by TMSA festivals, the acclaimed young singer Siobhan Miller.

At a time when the issue of migration has never been so much with us, notable author and Scots language champion James Robertson has audaciously re-imagined Joni Mitchell’s classic 1976 album Hejira- the very title of which is Arabic for the prophet Mohammed’s flight from Mecca.

Transmuted into Scots language and context, Pilgrimer features such esteemed Scots singers as Karine Polwart, Dick Gaughan, Rod Paterson and Gaelic star Julie Fowlis.

Also on board are the Grammy-winning American guitarist Larry Carlton - who played on Joni Mitchell’s original album - and electric bassist Felix Pastorius, whose father, the celebrated Jaco, left his distinctive stamp on the recording.

String arrangements have also been commissioned for the event from the eclectically-minded young composer Pippa Murphy.

Over some 40 years, Lucinda Williams has evolved from country-blues obscurity into a major, triple-Grammy-winning singer-songwriter.

A pillar of the contemporary American roots music scene, she distinctively fuses country, blues and rock with raw, world-weary but unignorable authority.

Having composed such established numbers as Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Atonement and Drunken Angel, she consolidated her reputation last year by re-releasing her eponymously-titled debut album of 1988.

She has since gone on to reap fresh acclaim with her double-album Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone.

In this performance, she’ll be drawing from her latest album Ghosts of Highway 20, inspired by a coast-to-coast interstate highway and signposted with personal connections.

Béla Fleck, a virtuoso of an instrument more popularly associated with Appalachian music or Irish ceilidh bands, was originally schooled in bluegrass.

He has since gone on to play with such luminaries as contemporary classical bassist Edgar Meyer, jazz pianist Chick Corea and Indian percussionist Zakir Hussein.

At Celtic Connections he joins forces with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra to present his unique banjo concerto, which he subtitles, self-deprecatingly, as The Importer.

Also playing with the SSO strings will be the fine Irish uilleann piper Liam O’Flynn - his set including extracts from Shaun Davey’s ground-breaking pipes-and-orchestra composition The Brendan Voyage.

They may have been brought up by different mothers, but Martha and Lucy, the daughters of Loudon Wainwright III by Kate McGarrigle and Suzzy Roche, have both established themselves as folk performers of note.

They also sing together beautifully, not least on their recent, highly engaging and lullaby-infused duo album Songs in the Dark.

Expect spine-tingling harmony singing as well as some wry musings – as in Runs in the Family – and just an echo of the high and lonesome West.

Support comes in the form of legendary producer and singer-songwriter, Ethan Johns. Famous for producing the likes of Ryan Adams, Laura Marling, and Paul McCartney, Johns will be performing material from his new album, Silver Liner.

An immense stylistic influence on the folk scene - and well beyond - was the Glasgow-born guitarist Bert Jansch, who died in 2011.

Jansch made his name both as a solo musician and also with the folk-rock band Pentangle - with who enjoyed immense success, particularly in the late Sixties and early Seventies.

Pentangle’s singer, Jacqui McShee will be joined by none other than Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, who describes his debt to Jansch as “enormous and longstanding”.

Others paying tribute include Scottish folk veteran Archie Fisher (who gave Jansch early blues guitar lessons) and former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler, who carries the torch these days for Jansch’s music.