JP Cormier at the Sharbot Lake Country Inn

Jeff Green | Sep 15, 2011

Photo: JP Cormier on Banjo, one of four instruments he has mastered.

Frank and Sandra White, the owners of the Sharbot Lake Country Inn, are just putting the finishing touches on a complete remake of the bottom floor of the hotel. In a few weeks it will be the combination dining and entertainment room of the hotel, as the current restaurant area becomes a new retail store.

The renovations to the ground floor, the former Katie’s Pub, have been completed and it is only the new kitchen that is still being finalized. The dining room converts into an intimate performance space, ideal for solo musicians or 3 or four piece acoustic bands.

On Friday night, Sept. 9, JP Cormier, a multi-instrumentalist from Cape Breton who plays a number of styles of music on just about every stringed instrument going, made the room come alive.

Accompanied by his long-time musical collaborators, the Elliott Brothers, on guitar and bass, Cormier ripped through a number of Cape Breton Celtic tunes on guitar and fiddle to start the evening off, then switched to mandolin to play an effortless medley of bluegrass founding father Bill Munroe's lightning-fast songs.

The astonishing range of JP Cormier's musicality and dedication to all the instruments he plays flawlessly is shown on his website. While most musicians have a list of albums, Cormier's has a section called JP's Musical Rooms. Under five different headings: banjo, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, and songwriter, there are lists of recordings featuring each of the instruments in turn.

He performed a number of his own songs in Sharbot Lake, taken from the three albums of original music he has produced over the years. His singing is featured more on his own songs, which tend more towards ballads than the faster-paced instrumental pieces of the rest of the show. Cormier played a number of love ballads, but perhaps the most affective of his own songs was the one about a town of 60 people in Newfoundland that was literally closed down by the government. Although rural Ontario is a long way from Newfoundland, the song struck home with the audience in a region that also faces threats to the viability of many of its small towns.

The two-set concert ended with a rousing encore taken straight from JP Cormier's Cape Breton roots, to the delight of the crowd.

After the concert, Sandra White said that the Country Inn plans to bring performers in on a monthly basis for at least three seasons of the year. Next month, blues singer and guitarist Suzie Vinnick will perform, and Peterborough-based guitarist Rick Fines will be coming after that.