American jazz and funk collective Snarky Puppy were playing a concert in Quebec when the singer in the hip-hop leaning Canadian support band caught bass guitarist Michael League’s attention.

League and the rest of Snarky Puppy immediately agreed that the singer, Malika Tirolien should join them for a number onstage that night and from there a friendship has blossomed that has resulted in first, Tirolien singing on Snarky Puppy’s 2013 album, Family Dinner Volume One and then League forming the side project Bokanté, which makes its Celtic Connections debut next weekend.

“All of Snarky Puppy were blown away when we heard Malika that first time,” says League down the line from the house in Spain where, when he’s not touring or recording with either band, he’s working on new music. “It wasn’t just her voice. She’s a musician in a holistic way, a great instrumentalist and a great improviser who knows what’s happening onstage. She hears voicings and potential voicings better than I do and she’s a terrifyingly consistent singer.”

Tirolien was born in Guadeloupe, where she showed an early interest in music. Her grandmother played piano and her father, a history teacher by profession, was a self-taught multi-instrumentalist who noticed Malika’s aptitude for music and sent her to piano lessons. By the age of eight, Malika, whose ability with lyrics may have come down the family from her grandfather, the poet Guy Tirolien, was recording her first song in a studio and playing with the band her dad ran in his spare time.

A career in music seemed inevitable and at 18 she left home to study music at the University of Montreal, where she and some fellow students formed Groundfood, the band that League heard her singing with in New York.

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“I fairly quickly decided to form a band that would feature Malika,” says League. “I began writing music for a group of musicians I had in mind, some of them are members of Snarky Puppy, others are people who have been a major influence, like André Ferrari who plays percussion with the Swedish folk group Vasen. One of the main ideas, though, was that people who came to see Bokanté would see diversity in action. We have musicians from four continents. They all have very individual voices but I chose them because I knew they would all know how to work together.”

So sure of his judgement was League about this combination of skills, sounds and personalities that the band didn’t actually play together until they arrived in the studio to begin recording their first album, Strange Circles. He and Tirolien chose the name Bokanté, which means “exchange” in Creole, the language Tirolien grew up with in Guadeloupe, and League even set an agenda in terms of the subjects he wanted Tirolien to sing about.

“I was pretty specific, it’s true,” says League. “When I was writing the music for that first album, I was imagining Malika’s voice and I wanted the band to be topical, so I sent her files by email and asked her to write lyrics that addressed certain issues.”

Tirolien was keen also to add her own ideas. “There were four topics that Michael asked me to write about,” she says. “Five of the songs were about things I had on my mind and one song was about Prince's death since it happened while we were in the studio.”

To further differentiate between Bokanté and Snarky Puppy (who are emphatically still in business and will spend eight months on the road this year following the release of a new album shortly) League bought a baritone guitar and passed the bass guitar role on to a series of guests. Having played guitar in his teens before switching to bass, he found the transition relatively easy, easier certainly, he says, than taking up the oud, which he also plays in Bokanté.

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For their second album, What Heat, Bokanté were joined by the Metropole Orkest, the remarkable merging of chamber orchestra and jazz big band from the Netherlands that has featured a diverse range of guests including soul-jazz singer Lalah Hathaway and Canadian singer-songwriter Gino Vannelli and celebrated the music of pioneering jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus at last year’s BBC Proms.

For Tirolien this was a dream come true that she hopes to repeat with the project she leads outside of Bokanté, although League and Snarky Puppy have become such close friends with the ensemble and their charismatic conductor, Jules Buckley, that a further collaboration between the Metropole Orkest and Bokanté might come first.

“We’d certainly be looking to work with them again, whether with Snarky Puppy or Bokanté,” says League. “They’re such an amazing and amazingly adaptable ensemble.”

With the music on What Heat, League and Tirolien again communicated ideas by email while touring with their respective groups but also got together in League’s Spanish hideaway to work on songs together.

“There’s no shortage of topics to address in the world at the moment,” says League. “Sometimes I feel I’d rather have no inspiration at all and work in the post office in a better world than draw attention to the struggles we face in our world today - racism, the refugee crisis, a dying planet, apathy towards human suffering. But in doing what we do, we can – I hope - give a voice to the voiceless and celebrate unity, connection and as the band’s name says, exchange.”

Not to downplay the power and sincerity of the Bokanté message but the music also works on a feel-good level. There’s a vibrancy to the band in full cry, with Tirolien’s remarkable presence adding to the sense that this is a party with serious undertones.

For Tirolien, her singing in both Creole and French together with the music League has created for a band of considerable talents should, she says, bring the audience “healing, discomfort, questions, inspiration, joy, answers, motivation, peace, and goosebumps.”

League, who revels in having the composer of the first tune Snarky Puppy ever played, André Ferrari, beside him in Bokanté, is keen to point out that Bokanté’s repertoire is essentially drawn from folkloric music and emphasises its blues elements.

“I play the oud, as well as the baritone guitar, with Bokanté because I see the oud as a blues instrument and a lot of the influences we’ve drawn on from around the world have that same sense of direct, straight to the heart communication that you get with blues singers,” says League. “So while the songs are not in English the idea is that the audience will get a real feeling for what we want to convey. The blues is a folkloric music. Middle Eastern music, which we’ve learned a lot from is, obviously, folkloric music and what we want to do is show that there’s so much more to be done with that music. We have a long way to go and a lot more ideas to work on.”

Bokanté plays Queen Margaret Union, Glasgow on Saturday, February 2.