Celtic Connections annually brings the best, most exciting and most innovative musicians to Glasgow to perform their own brand of roots, folk and traditional music, or to collaborate in joint ventures which blend those forms. This year, the festival also celebrates a trio of departed greats with three tribute concerts dedicated to their memories

IVOR CUTLER

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Ivor Cutler, the Glasgow-born writer and musician who played many roles during his 83 years on this earth – poet, maverick, teacher, eccentric, composer, film star (sort of) – and brought to them all his trademark humour, humanity and outsider's eye.

John Peel loved him, The Beatles loved him (they gave him a part in their Magical Mystery Tour film in 1967) and children and adults alike loved his Edward Lear-esque reflections, whether in prose or (more commonly) poetry. In 2014 the National Theatre of Scotland even put his life and work on stage in an award-winning touring show, The Beautiful Cosmos Of Ivor Cutler.

Duglas T Stewart, founder member of Scottish indie veterans BMX Bandits, is another who loved him – so much so that he has teamed up with Glasgow's Glad Community Choir to create Songs Of Ivor Cutler, an evening of music and poetry at the choir's HQ, The Glad Cafe in Shawlands.

Like many of his generation, Stewart first encountered Cutler and his work on John Peel's much-admired and hugely influential radio show.

“A lot of things I was attracted to artistically were things which had a childlike quality and which also had a cross between humour and pathos and seemed really individual, not a version of something else,” he recalls. “Ivor Cutler ticked all those boxes for me.”

Joining the 20-strong choir on stage, Stewart will contextualise Cutler for the uninitiated, steer the performance and recount anecdotes both humorous and poignant. There will also be a selection of special guests, still under wraps but sure to offer a few pleasant surprises.

“Like most things that I love I'm very evangelical about Ivor,” says Stewart. “I think he was a unique figure. He was stubborn, did things his way, refused to do them any other way. He would tell his audiences to applaud at half the volume because he didn't like the noise. He was quite contrary – but also very singular and very true to how he believed things should be done. That becomes a rarer and rarer quality in the world these days.”

Songs Of Ivor Cutler with Duglas T Stewart and the Glad Community Choir is at the Glad Cafe on January 22

BERT JANSCH

Neil Young, no less, called him the Jimi Hendrix of the acoustic guitar while Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin join Keith Richards and Elton John in the club of celebrity admirers. The object of their devotion? Scottish folk guitarist Bert Jansch.

Born in Glasgow but raised in Edinburgh, Jansch was a guitar prodigy who fused jazz and folk idioms into a dazzling virtuoso style. Allied to a Serge Gainsbourg-style cool, it made him a star first on the capital's nascent folk scene and later in London, to which he re-located in the mid-1960s. Inevitably, he was soon dubbed “the British Bob Dylan”.

Jansch died in 2011 aged 67, just weeks after appearing at London's Royal Festival Hall with Pentangle, the band he played in between 1968 and 1972. Later this month, however, he will be given the two-night tribute treatment at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in a star-studded show forming one of the centrepieces of the ongoing Celtic Connections festival. Among those performing is Plant himself.

But it isn't just the blues- and folk-inspired rock stars of the 1960s and 1970s who are in thrall to Jansch and his legacy. Bernard Butler, guitarist with Suede, is a long-time admirer. As well as guesting on Jansch's Crimson Moon and Edge Of A Dream albums in 2000 and 2002, Butler performed live with him several times, including on a Jools Holland show which also featured Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, another Jansch fan. In a 2013 performance at London's Southbank Centre, he and Plant reprised Go Your Way My Love and Butler will be joining Plant onstage in Glasgow for this month's concert.

“When most people were just breathing, Bert was playing guitar,” Butler has said. “That sound really was his whole life; the vibrations of the strings were life-giving. The notes were like words and the whole sound a conversation.”

Bert Inspired: A Concert For Bert Jansch is at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on January 31 and February 1

EDITH PIAF

Edith Piaf had been dead over 20 years when Anne Carrere was born in 1985. But over the course of 100 gruelling performances last year, the 30-year-old French singer brought her to life again in Piaf! The Show, an extravaganza of music and song mounted to mark the centenary of Piaf's birth. This month, the production comes to Glasgow for two Celtic Connections performances as part of the festival's Showcase Scotland programme, a partnership with France.

Inspired in part by La Vie En Rose, the Oscar-winning 2007 Piaf biopic which starred Marion Cotillard as the diminutive singer, Piaf! The Show takes audiences on a tour of her life, from her hardscrabble upbringing – allegedly born on a pavement in Belleville, she was raised in a brothel run by her grandmother and was working as a street performer by the age of 14 – to her position as national icon.

To help Carrere prepare for the role, the show's producer Gil Marsalla introduced her and the show's accordionist Guy Giuliano to Germaine Ricord, now living in Provence but Piaf's friend and tour partner for many years. “I was completely bowled over,” Ricord said after hearing Carrere sing.

Armed with that recommendation as well a simple set, a four-piece band and visual backdrops of Piaf and Paris, Carrere breathes new life into the songs made famous by the woman they called “the Little Sparrow”.

Piaf! The Show is at the Theatre Royal on January 27 and 28

The Sunday Herald is Celtic Connections' media partner. For tickets and programme details visit www.celticconnections.com