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One of the nicest things about Celtic Connections - apart from having a month of music in the darkest month of the year - is the way it brings together artists you wouldn't normally think to unite.

Whether that's informally through the almost homeless Festival Club or formally in staged concerts, it's one of the most succesful strands of the festival.

Transatlantic Sessions are a tried and tested formula - both live and recorded - and this year's show, which brings together 16 different performers from Scotland and North America, is so good they're once again doing it twice during the festival (with the final concert recorded for broadcast).

It's a starry line up. From the States - Nanci Griffith, Kathy Mattea, Tim O'Brien, Bruce Molsky and Dirk Powell, not to mention Dan Tyminski, familiar to some from Alison Krauss' Union Station, but ladies and gentleman, also the singing voice of George Clooney in O Brother Where Art Thou.

The Scots send in their big hitters too - Eddi Reader and Julie Fowlis, Celtic Connections' own artistic director Donald Shaw, a late substitution in the form of the multi-talented John McCusker and Phil Cunningham.

Phil's sparring partner Aly Bain - never Aly McBain or Mr Bean as we later discover - is the Scots musical director, while dobro expert Jerry Douglas keeps the Americans in line. Kind of.
That's part of the joy of these concerts, people come and go, can't find a seat - at least twice, long legged Eddi Reader clambers over chairs to find a spot - provide impromptu backing and occasionally sit on a sofa at the back, as if they were in someone's living room.

But for all the spontainety, it's finely tuned - they admit to hours of rehearsals - and as individual performers, they're all so adept, there's barely even a false start.

The music is a mix of Gaelic songs (Fowlis on fine form), Scots reels and jigs, American traditional music - cue all the banjo jokes, and songs from their own respective releases.

Dan Tyminski is working hard. Between sessions, he's off to the Central Hotel, apparently, to record his contribution to a Radio 3 broadcast, but he's back in time for a memorable rendition of A Man Of Constant Sorrow.

There's a hasty but heart felt addition of the John Martyn song - May You Never - in tribute to the singer who died just the day before.

Almost every musician on the stage worked with him.

"I remember interviewing him for a radio show and asking if it was the first time he'd ever been interviewed by an accordion player," recalls Phil Cunningham.

"And he mumbled, the first time I even had one in the house."

Jerry Douglas recalled a Transatlantic Sessions snooker match in which the usual rule of "one leg on the ground at all times" had to be hastily rewritten for Martyn.

There's a determined squeeze to get all 16 performers back onstage for a rendition of Randy Newman's Sail Away, ably led vocally by Tim O'Brien.

With so many performers, even a two and a quarter hour concert leaves the audience wanting more - but unless they have tickets for Sunday's show, they'll have to wait for the highlights on television in February. Or indeed next year's festival.