Country star Troy Cassar-Daley and the legendary guitarist Ian Moss accomplished something exceptional at the Newcastle City Concert Hall last night. Before a near capacity crowd, made to seem smaller by the towering ceilings above us, we were treated to an old-fashioned kind of musical intimacy normally reserved for the privacy of a campfire or a lounge room. Had they not both so graciously shared with us so many of their spoken stories, arranged like bookends around the edges of their songs, they might have forgotten that we were even there.

There's a shorter word for what we saw, that spontaneous yet intricate banter between instruments, the joyous back-and-forth that any live collaboration depends upon. Just as short as that word looks on paper, what we were treated to last night looked like something simple. Acoustic and organic. Earthy. It was a jam.

The signs were there from the very beginning. Even before meandering into Ain't No Sunshine, their first of two nods to the soulful greats of their roots, Cassar-Daley casually invited Moss to join in the banter, to acknowledge the audience and ease them into the set ahead.

And there was Mossy, already immersed and oblivious, wandering about his fretboard with a thousand fingers, calloused by twice as many bars. He wasn't there to hand out invitations. He cut Cassar-Daley off. He rambled. He embellished upon every instrumental with fresh, inventive riffs that even he had never heard of before. He set fire to Flame Trees with the last match in his box, flicking it to the sun-stroked earth with a brooding, slow-burning reprise. He jammed.

But Cassar-Daley didn't mind in the slightest. He was too gracious and too polished to care at all. If Moss was the stiff-necked, jittery elder of genius, then his stage mate was the smoother of his edges. Because Troy Cassar-Daley isn't really a country music star. Slick labels like that don't stick for too long to denim that dusty. Let's just call him a storyteller. An acoustic bridge between the bright lights and the river that runs under them. A man who plays a harmonica that Paul Kelly gave him, alongside a banjo lent to him by a Wiggle. A charismatic everyman. Quick with a joke and an authentic story from all of our soils.

Yet his set gave so much more than witty banter with the old man Moss. River Boy and Going Back Home tingled with nostalgia and sorrow. Freedom Ride, first written by Kelly, was another heartfelt tribute to country. This dedication to Charles Perkins, the closest man this nation has to Martin Luther King, was enlivened by a poignant, lyrical empathy for which Cassar-Daley is deservedly adored.

By the time Cassar-Daley arrived at his Shadows on the Hill, we had already learnt, as much as is possible, about the ghosts that live in every indigenous heart. After the song was over, you could hear the kind of applause that only follows a rare and courageous release of a difficult truth. It was there, in the breath between the last note on the banjo and the first crack of clapping hands that the pin drop moment fell. It was delicate and fleeting, as most important emotional moments are, but it landed like a meteor.

Over on the other side of the stage, Ian Moss was gritting his teeth through a familiar, extraordinary battle between man and guitar. While he sat there hardened and upright, as if only his top half was standing at attention, he made the neck of his guitar sound like it was bending through a body of noisy water. It was Bow River by name but also by mannerism. And by the time he came around to rallying us all into a singalong of that song, we had been swept away in the rich and familiar tenor of that voice - a sound almost as familiar as that other bloke who once sang for Cold Chisel.

And just as we all had secretly hoped, the sweaty and boozy pub-rock memory of our pasts, the Chisel of old, was exactly what Ian Moss was there to revisit. Alongside his own hits, like Telephone Booth and Tuckers Daughter - which he lovingly attributed to the dark, lyrical poetry of Don Walker - it was those moments that filled the concert hall with the most palpable energies. Never Before, from the seminal 1980 Cold Chisel album, East, was lovingly kneaded by Moss into a strangely shaped but eventually delicious blend of steamy, bluesy beauty.

Just as Cassar-Daley did, with his disarmingly confessional kind of honesty, Moss shared his own private pains and visions of the finishing line. One of his newest songs, River Runs Dry, was a searing, heartbreaking tribute to an old friend in an hour of need. Watching Moss sing his soul out on that one, facing loss and the impermanence of his friendships, was yet another powerful reminder of exactly what companions, even enormously talented musicians like these ones, can add to each other's lives.