CONCERT: JP Cormier

In 1974 JP Cormier he was a five-year-old boy, discovering an innate talent for playing the guitar. By the mid '80s, not out of his teens, he was a sideman for bands and artists of many different genres in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and all across the deep south. As he travelled and worked, he added more and more instruments to his arsenal of capabilities. He became indispensable to the bands he worked for.

In the early ‘90s, he became a sideman for one of Canada’s favorite sons, Stompin’ Tom Connors and also became a staple of the recordings at Studio H in Halifax. His work with the CBC there spanned musical, production and arranging duties.

In the mid-nineties he reentered the musical scene of his beloved East Coast and the Island called Cape Breton. He exploded onto the trad music scene there as a fiddler, performing some of the most difficult music ever produced by legends like Winston Fitzgerald and Angus Chisholm with a facility that stunned onlookers. Especially those who knew he wasn’t born there but born in Ontario to Cape Breton parents. Somehow, some way, his music was the real thing, sounding like he had been steeped continually in a handed-down brew of family tradition from the old country.

His previous gig was in Nashville playing mandolin and banjo in a Grammy nominated Bluegrass gospel band and performing on the Opry and playing television shows with the likes of Waylon Jennings. All those people also thought he was one of them, American, reared in the ways of bluegrass, old time and Americana music. They knew he was from Canada, but it just didn’t seem possible.