Today, composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland releases his first new piece of music in over 15 years. The new single, “River Dreams” will appear on his forthcoming album, Transmissions: The Music of Beverly Glenn-Copeland out on September 25th via Transgressive, the new label home for both Glenn’s catalogue and future recordings.
Glenn explains, “I feel that music originates from the Universe itself, and it comes to me via something I call the UBS i.e. The Universal Broadcasting System. This song River Dreams came to me through the UBS. The song has a feeling to it. It is both calming and interesting because of the unusual time signature which is seventeen eighth notes to every bar. Musically that is expressed as 17/8 instead of time signatures with which we are more familiar like 4/4 or 3/4. I recorded it in my home studio sometime in 2019.”
Transmissions is a career-spanning album that includes compositions from his early works and his cult-status release, Keyboard Fantasies. It also includes both new and archival unreleased tracks and live versions. Fans can pre-order Transmissions here today. Listen to the new single “River Dreams” here.
In 1970, nine years after leaving the United States to study music in Canada, Beverly Glenn-Copeland released two self-titled albums. Both were a stunning showcase of classical and jazz acumen, layered with poetry and accompanied by some of the best players of the time. Original pressings now fetch thousands of dollars. Glenn-Copeland then vanished as a recording artist until his re-emergence in 1986 with the release (just a few hundred copies on cassette) of what many now believe to be his masterpiece, Keyboard Fantasies. Thirty years later, revered Japanese record-collector Ryota Masuko came across one of those cassettes and went on a mission to turn other audiophiles onto Glenn-Copeland’s work and to find the artist himself.
Word spread and a cult following was quickly amassed. After repeated requests for live performances, Beverly Glenn-Copeland acquiesced, forming a band of young musicians he calls Indigo Rising and playing his first-ever shows in Canada and Europe. Nearly 60 years after he departed the United States, Beverly Glenn-Copeland returned in late 2019 with a performance at MOMA in New York City alongside a short documentary from the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s In the Making series and a screening of feature documentary Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story by Posy Dixon.
Winner of the 2020 Audience Award at Hot Docs, the film – part biopic, part tour documentary – catches up with Glenn-Copeland as he embarks on his first international tour at the age of 74. The film is currently appearing on the international festival circuit and upcoming screenings can be found here.
Although the recorded output of his career has been sparse, he has been prolific in other ways. Canadian’s knew him best as regular guest ‘Beverly’ on the beloved Canadian children’s TV show Mr. Dress-up for nearly 30 years. He wrote for Sesame Street. He wrote musicals, operas, children’s music and hundreds upon hundreds of other songs even though he only had the means to record those few aforementioned albums. ‘There is this incredible underlying thing,’ he says, ‘that joy and suffering is a part of life. Life is good and bad. There is something profound to being alive. The great joy is to be alive. That is wondrous. Being alive means you’re going to go through some hell, some wonderful stuff and a lot of stuff that is neither here nor there.’
MORE ABOUT BEVERLY GLENN COPELAND:
The diverse work of legendary Canadian/American singer, composer and transgender activist Beverly Glenn-Copelandhas been gathering momentum and recognition in recent years thanks to a reissue of the extraordinary folk-jazz of his debut self-titled album (1970) and the widespread discovery of his masterpiece Keyboard Fantasies (1986). This year’s re-issue of Primal Prayer (originally self-released in 2004) and recent tours throughout North America and Europe have shown that Glenn-Copeland’s music continues to defy categorisation and genre 50 years after his miraculous career began.
Born in Philadelphia in 1944, Glenn-Copeland grew up in a house obsessed with classical music, his father practiced piano for 5 hours a night. Glenn refers to Bach, Chopin and Mozart as his ‘cradle music’, music that seeped into his blood-stream. He moved to Montreal in 1961 so that he could study German Lieder (song-cycles) at McGill University. Faced with challenges and hostility relating to his race, gender and sexual orientation he dropped out of university before completing his degree. He picked up a guitar and started writing music.
In 1970 Glenn-Copeland recorded two brilliant albums. The first was part of CBC Radio’s ‘Transcription Series’ titled Beverly Copeland. It was a virtuosic showcase of classical and jazz vocal stylings, poetry, jazz and folk, accompanied by some of the best players of the time. Original pressings of that album now fetch thousands of dollars when passed from collector to collector – just 250 copies were pressed. Six months later Glenn-Copeland made a studio album with many of those same musicians, this time titled Beverly Glenn-Copeland, it was folk-jazz classic and an album that has been the subject of a mystical reputation and underground following for almost five decades now.
It wasn’t until 1986 that Glenn-Copeland recorded again. This time he was inspired by a profound relationship with nature, an obsession with science fiction and some of the earliest drum-machines and synthesisers. Keyboard Fantasiesis a minimalist, proto-electronic masterpiece with unbelievable soul. Imagine Joni Mitchell collaborating with Brian Eno and you’ll get close. Self-released on cassette, it sold less than 100 copies at the time. But Keyboard Fantasies was this record that would break Glenn’s career wide-open more than 30 years later.
Glenn wasn’t twiddling his thumbs between these now-iconic records. His life has been a non-stop combination self-discovery and part pop-culture fairy-tale. He appeared as regular guest ‘Beverly’ on the beloved Canadian children’s TV show Mr. Dress-up for nearly 30 years. He wrote for Sesame Street. He lived in the cities and in the wild. He wrote musicals, operas, children’s music and hundreds upon hundreds of other songs even though he only had the means to record those few aforementioned albums.
In the early 1990’s Beverly Glenn-Copeland first heard the term ‘transgender’. Armed with the language to describe the way he had felt since before he was even a teenager, he found a self-identity which had eluded him his whole life.
In 2016 Keyboard Fantasies was discovered by a revered Japanese record-store owner and collector. Word spread in the record-collecting community and several re-issues were released on different labels. Glenn played his first shows of original music in more than 40 years to standing ovation after standing ovation. He formed a band of brilliant and talented young musicians from Nova Scotia, Montreal and Toronto and started touring the world.
