By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Arts Reporter
CAPE BRETON’S GENTLE giant J. P. Cormier must
have bluegrass in his veins. A superb guitarist
with an ear-boggling finger technique, almost every
song Cormier touches explodes into life with that
blood-boiling bluegrass energy that sent Bill Monroe
to the top of the bluegrass world for more than
50 years before his death in 1996.
No
one can resist this music. Certainly not the fans
who roared into life after every one of Cormier’s
solos on Symphony NovaScotia’s Maritime Pops
Concert in the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium on Friday
night.
But
"JP", as everybody calls him, propels
the already irresistible twitchiness of the bluegrass
style into high orbit by playing it on guitar, fiddle
and banjo as well as mandolin. Monroe was also a
multi-instrumentalist, but was especially adept
at playing the mandolin, a small instrument with
eight strings tuned in pairs to the same tuning
as the violin. Monroe picked like a whiz bang as
did many of the bluegrass artists that appeared
with him after he joined the Grand Ol Opry in 1939.
But
the guitar is bigger. It has six single strings
and a neck which is both wider and longer than the
mandolin. How JP can negotiate this at breakneck
speeds is one of the wonders of our world here in
Nova Scotia. And his music, much of it original,
goes far beyond Monroe, because JP knows all the
Cape Breton fiddle tunes, too.
He
is also one of our most justly admired songwriters.
Fans know his music well. Only a measure into his
first tune, his touching song called Another Morning,
about aging and going home, they hollered with pleasure
as they did for Kelly’s Mountain, the second
last song on the show.
Both
songs, as is his style, JP backed up with fast intros
and breaks though the melodies soared in a sweetly
melancholic arc as light as air above.
He
sang or played five more originals, paid homage
to his favourite songwriter with Gordon Lightfoot’s
Song for a Winter’s Night and The Railroad
Trilogy, added a set of Irish and Scottish jigs
in duet with Scott Macmillan and paid tribute to
Chet Atkins (Blue Angel).
Macmillan
conducted the orchestra, arranged most of the music,
and stepped off the podium to play his New Century
Hornpipe with JP, letting the orchestra, who know
many of Macmillan’s tunes after years of working
with him on Maritime Pops concerts, play their stuff
on their own — which they did, flawlessly
for all I could tell.
That
piece with its unexpected twists and turns, both
melodically and structurally, is a challenge. Just
as it gets to seem familiar, it spacewarps with
an unexpected lurch in a different direction. It’s
a barnburner in which the guitars are flame-throwers.
JP’s
own band included the ever-reliable Hilda Chiasson-Cormier
on keyboard and finger-whiz Darren McMullen on rhythm
guitar, bouzouki and electric bass.
Macmillan
began each half with his own compositions —
the Cheticamp Overture at the top of the show, and
his Mi Careme Soiree — also inspired by Cheticamp
festivals — at the top of the second half.
The
overture blazes away with an exciting brass fanfare
in an extended intro. The soirée is full
of orchestral dexterity in the way of colour and
dynamics.
The
orchestra played extremely well but didn’t
sound that good. The problem was the amplification.
Every two players in the strings and every player
in the winds and brass had separate microphones.
Such amplification boosts the sound level beyond
what is really necessary to back up amplified guitars.
But
even more important, it has a huge downside. It
robs the orchestra of their sound. Symphony Nova
Scotia is our most pristine acoustic ensemble. Every
player knows how to balance and blend and project
their unamplified sound, as well as how to play
with the kind of intonation and tone colour that
makes their sound bloom.
Microphones
get in the way of this essential ingredient to their
tone, leaving everything to the sound techs at the
back of the hall. And good as they are, and they
are very good indeed, they have a very different
model of what a back-up band should sound like.
The
audience, perhaps fortunately, don’t generally
hear the orchestra play with the kind of radiant
resonance they produce on baroque, classical and
contemporary concerts. But it’s a shame they
don’t get the chance to hear how sweet and
sassy they can sound without amplification when
they play behind the artists, like JP, whose sound
they know so well.
JP
announced from the stage that he and his band will
be travelling to Afghanistan in May, joining other
Canadian artists as part of a large entertainment
tour for The Canadian Forces stationed there.
(
spedersen@herald.ca)
