The hands at work onstage are impressive enough.

At regular intervals during the first visit by Quilapayun to Edinburgh for 20 years, the thought occurred that whoever is responsible for making sure every one of these instruments being pressed into service makes it to the next concert is performing a Herculean task.

Quilapayun need this collection of wooden flutes, various strings, frets, keyboards and percussion to effect their transition from the folkloric voice of the Chilean people in the 1960s and early 1970s through classically trained sophistication and on to quite the party band. It's like watching, in the space of 90 minutes, the Spinners morph into Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club.

Like exiles the world over, they haven't forgotten their roots and their dedications to national heroes, be they poets or presidents, and ordinary citizens alike positively brim with beautifully harmonised fervour. The vocal arrangement that imparted Uruguayan activist Daniel Viglietti's Por Ellos Canto would have done credit to Brian Wilson and the impassioned singing of Ramona Parra, a young woman shot dead in a 1946 Santiago demonstration, ensured its heroine's spirit remains vividly alive.

All the while, the 14-string tiple passes through various hands, guitars are strummed, a snare drum is stroked with casual expertise, maracas briefly shake, flutes intone their descants and the pan pipe's dual role as melody and rhythm instrument is brilliantly underlined before first, something akin to Chilean salsa, brings the isolated pockets of dancing in the audience together in jubilation and then band and audience unite in a defiant Chilean anthem that makes stepping out on to Lothian Road afterwards feel slightly alien.

HHHH