Brìghde Chaimbeul & Shahzad Ismaily @ Saint Luke’s, Glasgow, 21 Jan

Celtic Connections, Glasgow’s long running festival of Scottish and international folk music, has long encouraged collaboration, acting as a springboard for performers to form wonky alliances across global and genre divides. It’s a collaborative sprit that serves tonight’s support Cahalen Morrison Trio well. The titular singer’s songs of the American west are elevated massively by the contributions of jazz folk duo Norman+Corrie; the pair’s slippery drumming and dusky sax inject a sense of movement and crackling atmosphere that raises them above their usual sparseness.

But it’s Brìghde Chaimbeul and Shahzad Ismaily’s union that defines the night. She’s the pipe player who has stamped a place in the contemporary experimental and folk worlds by channeling the Gaelic traditions and folklore of Skye through the compositional techniques of the great minimalists of the seventies. He, on the other hand, is a New York multi-instrumentalist and one of the most in-demand collaborators in the world, working with as broad a circle as Bob Dylan, Arooj Aftab and Moses Sumney. Initially playing together at festivals in America the pair have truly bedded in, and they make for a brilliantly complimentary spectacle tonight.

As much as this is billed as a collaborative performance, it is Chaimbeul firmly at the reigns. Playing largely from last year’s fantastic Sunwise, it’s a superb set, her capacity to wrench feeling from her growling drones a true sight to behold in the flesh. What’s striking up close is the sheer variety of tones she can get from this ancient instrument, to the extent that 707 sounds like a very Celtic take on Kosmiche, all rolling arpeggios and space age burble. At its best, as on A’Chailleach, it's like the instrument has taken hold of her, dragging her into some mire like it’s an anaconda she’s wrestling, a great winding spiral of sound.

There’s a specific style of collaboration you often get from these kinds of shows that isn’t here though; often you get two disparate styles tangled into an exciting but ultimately unsatisfying and ungainly mess. Here, Ismaily sits back, an absolute peerless sideman, providing the complimentary sub-tone glower that allows Chaimbeul’s reeling melodies to really soar. It means it never stops feeling like body music, felt in the chest before pushing outwards into the heavens. What’s most captivating on record with Chaimbeul is this ability to meld queasy, subterranean drones and an ascendant feeling of beauty, and it’s this the pair absolutely nail tonight.

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Celtic Connections runs at various venues across Glasgow until 1 Feb