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After winning the 2010 Good Tradition title at the Radio 2 Folk Awards, then embarking on a first-ever UK tour, the Transatlantic Sessions settle back into their original live home, magically transforming the Concert Hall stage into the back porch of your dreams. The show’s rapturous ovations up and down the country echoed the audience response every year at Celtic Connections, and the 2011 line-up is sure to be no exception.

As with the concerts’ companion BBC TV series – also featuring Shetland fiddle icon Aly Bain and dobro deity Jerry Douglas as joint musical directors – the secret of their cumulative success is the dynamic between longtime stalwarts of the line-up and new or occasional contributors, balancing (often hilariously) relaxed familiarity with the revelatory potential of fresh encounters.

The historic kinship of Old and New World traditions, which both programmes and performances set out to explore, continues to bear new 21st-century fruit, making the common ground mapped during these two nights one of today’s richest musical territories.

While none of our guests are less than special, it’s a particularly opportune juncture to welcome Ireland’s tirelessly creative Paul Brady, who recently followed up 2009’s re-release of his landmark LP Welcome Here Kind Stranger with a career-best collection of new originals, Hooba Dooba. Likewise Allison Moorer, who attained a similar distinction with 2010’s soul-searching, stripped-down Crows. Transatlantic Sessions debutante Ashley Cleveland, accompanied by her guitarist husband Kenny Greenberg, is a triple Grammy-winning spiritual/gospel singer of extraordinary potency, while Julie Fowlis’s vocal eloquence equally treasures and transcends her Gaelic heritage. US roots doyens Tim O’Brien and Cold Mountain star, Dirk Powell, once again grace the proceedings with their vocal and multi-instrumental prowess, flanked as ever by a crème-de-la-crème ‘house band’ including Phil Cunningham, Danny Thompson, John Doyle, Russ Barenberg, Mike McGoldrick, John McCusker, James Mackintosh and Donald Shaw.

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