When the Georgia Straight reaches master percussionist Zakir Hussain at home in sunny Marin County, California, he’s enjoying a brief breather between tours, with his most recent involving a trip back to the land of his birth to participate in India’s bustling concert season. It was an experience that combined the very good with the excruciatingly bad—both, it seems, stemming from unexpected sources.

“My body has gotten so used to breathing clear air and eating organically grown, healthy food, that what I used to be able to do in India—like eat street food and all that stuff—I can’t do anymore,” he relates. “If I eat that, I’m down—or, more precisely, belly-up. Even me, coming from India, now I’m confined to drinking bottled water and only eating cooked food. It’s kind of sad.”

Hussain has no regrets over anything that happened on-stage, however. There were concerts with some of the greats of Indian classical music; Hussain, of course, is the son of Ravi Shankar’s long-time accompanist Alla Rakha. There were jazzy “rhythm-fusion” jams with fellow percussionists Steve Smith, of Journey fame, and Trilok Gurtu. And Hussain also got a chance to polish the show he’s bringing to Vancouver this weekend, Celtic Connections, in which he’s joined by an all-star cast of musicians from the subcontinent, Ireland, Scotland, and Brittany.

First produced at the Glasgow festival of the same name in 2011, Celtic Connections finds Hussain and company exploiting some coincidental similarities between Celtic and Indian music, but also more recent exchanges, including Hussain’s work with the late Beatle George Harrison and the interplay between Indian musicians and British military bands.

“First of all, there’s the instruments,” Hussain says. “Take the pipes, for instance. You have the drone in the back, and then you play on top of it. It allows you to be able to provide a beautiful pad of accompaniment to your melodic improv, or to playing a song.”

The same technique is used in Indian music, only with the four-stringed tamboura or a harmonium providing the drones. “And it doesn’t stop there,” the tabla virtuoso continues. “The British army brought in a whole bunch of Celts and other musicians to Waziristan and Peshawar and some northern provinces of India. So there was an interaction with those musicians—and I think part of the reason why shenai players, in India, use four other shenai players as a drone is because they heard it with the pipes, and it sounded just about right.”

Don’t expect a history lesson from Celtic Connections, however. Hussain’s intent is to show that like-minded musicians from dissimilar cultures can find their way to a hybrid sound that isn’t simply spliced together.

“More often than not, when you do a project like this it can wind up sounding like you’ve put on an Irish CD and an Indian CD and just pressed Play,” master bodhran player and Celtic Connections mainstay John Joe Kelly admits, in a separate interview from Manchester, England. “You’re just hoping that somewhere along the way they’ll meet somewhere in the middle. But the nice thing about musicians gathering in a room, as we’ve done, is that you can share each other’s different flavours, and just through trial and error see which is the best way to make the best sound. This is a group of people who don’t always get to meet on a weekly basis, but there’s a lot of energy in the room when we do meet, and it’s a good fun time.”

Zakir Hussain presents Celtic Connections at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Saturday (March 21).