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The project closest to Cormier's heart right now is the long-awaited release of Velvet Arm, Golden Hand, his collaboration with uncle Joe Cormier. The legendary fiddler moved to Boston over five decades ago, where he became the first Cape Breton fiddler to record for an American label (Rounder Records) and play Carnegie Hall. The elder Cormier also became an international musical ambassador, taking the sound of Celtic fiddle to China, Korea and Saudi Arabia.
"He's done pretty well for a guy who left Sydney in the late '40s to work in Boston as an electrician," says Cormier. "That's what he did his whole life is pull wire, but on the side he was this other person. He's a pretty special guy.

"I'll never forget when his first album arrived at our house in the mail, wrapped in brown paper. I remember my father pulling the paper off that thing and crying, looking at the picture of Joe on the cover. That record played in our house for . . . well, it's still playing, and that was 30 years ago that it came out."

The recording of two generations of Cormiers was spurred by Terry Egan of Patio Records in Boston, a longtime friend of Joe's who uses music to raise funds for the creation of garden patios in hospitals for recovering cancer patients.
The musicians spent a week recording the two fiddles and Hilda's piano, then J.P. spent six months finishing the album with overdubbing, editing, mixing and mastering. While much of it has a very finished, polished quality, they were careful not to lose the rambunctious spirit of Cape Breton fiddling.

"I set up a stereo mic and we had a party," he says. "I recorded the party and three of those tracks ended up on the album too.
"Those rock. That's full-bore, that's really what it sounds like, you know what I mean? That's why I put it on there, that's the real sound without any electronic treatment. It isn't always the best possible way to hear something, but it's real."