For almost the entirety of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s life, the music was there but listeners were not. Then, one day in 2016, an intervention wholesome enough to feel scripted arrived: one spam-bound email from a record collector inquiring about back stock. Now audiences come to gather in the company of an artist who has spent three-quarters of a century revolving around the sun with one soul and two selves. The openly queer Black artist once shunned by peers and forced to flee sexual reprogramming has arrived at a moment where everybody wants to be his friend.
A palm-reader’s premonition in the 1970s that Glenn-Copeland would attain success in winter years was fulfilled when two reissues of his masterwork Keyboard Fantasies turned a trickle of interest into a surge. Look to pick up a copy online and you’ll be met with recommendations for Midori Takada and William Onyeabor––other brilliant musicians of the 1980s who became hot commodities on the market after decades of quiescence. If you were to walk into a listening bar either side of the globe in the last few years, chances are you’d catch the dinky, DX7-rendered electric piano on Keyboard Fantasies’ “Sunset Village” gliding out of a set of ludicrously expensive speakers. Hidden from view for so long, Glenn-Copeland was reborn as the North Star of new age.
That’s where the tale might have ended, were it not for the artist’s keenness to be actively involved, rather than just regarded as a dusty curio. A lifetime of withheld yeses poured forth from Glenn-Copeland: to lectures, to podcasts, even a segment on Canadian television where he flew to Tokyo and thanked his benefactor in person. Having appeared in concert just once between 1980 and 2018––a period in which Beverly transitioned, moved to the water’s edge in New Brunswick and found long-sought stability with his current wife, Elizabeth––he embarked on tour, delivering lieder-indebted torch songs and age-old spirituals that stretched well beyond Keyboard Fantasies’ synth miniatures, in performances as stately and dignified as the stained-glass murals that adorn his record sleeves and stage production.
Following a crowd-sourced documentary in 2019 which took his story wider still, Transmissions is the first formal attempt to gather works from across Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s career in one place. The physical copy spans just nine tracks and 47 minutes (although the digital edition extends past the hour mark), which appears slight for an artist who could easily command double the runtime. Given the wide variety of styles and moods across the compilation, as well as the potential for emotional overload, a gentle introduction might be an act of mercy. At numerous points, it can seem as if you’ve flipped over to a different record entirely.
The white-knuckle, fluent jamming of the Toronto jazz ensemble who feature on “Erzili”––which closed out 1971’s Beverly Glenn-Copeland––feels impossibly separate from the plangent synthesizer tones and steady tug of double-bass on the newest solo song here, 2018’s “River Dreams.” Three tracks from 2004’s little-known Primal Prayer make it the most represented of all Glenn-Copeland’s albums, another twist. Recorded under the alias Phynix, it captured Glenn-Copeland as he rebounded from a health scare with gaiety in abundance. The jaunty, cruise-ready instrumentals that lead them off only really make sense when Glenn-Copeland swoops down on deck and begins to warble. Transmissions opens with one of these: “La Vita” surges forth in Italian with operatic flair, a sharp rejoinder if you came expecting to be soothed, before melting into what most listeners would recognize as the conventional A1 of Glenn-Copeland’s oeuvre, Keyboard Fantasies’ “Ever New.”
Across Glenn-Copeland’s songbook are pearls of wisdom about grace, forgiveness and spiritual ablution; given what we know of the artist’s history, it’s easy to find yourself shrinking in your seat. Two haunting numbers from 1970’s Beverly Copeland reflect the climate he grew up in: “Sometimes,” Beverly beckons on “Durocher,” “I get to thinking what’s the use of going on? What’s the use of loving when hatred is so strong?” Solace lies in “Don’t Despair”: “Tomorrow may bring roses...tomorrow may bring love.” Glenn-Copeland’s voice anchors it all, a rich contralto capable of zooming up octaves and hushing a crowd from fifty paces. This is most evident in a rendition of “Deep River,” captured during Utrecht arts festival Le Guess Who?, where Glenn-Copeland performed in 2018 at the invitation of Devendra Banhart and Moor Mother. In between that enrapturing flutter, he breaks into a speaking voice somewhere between compère and camp leader, inviting the assembled throng to chant with him and his band, Indigo Rising. The audience, hesitant to encroach at first, slowly creeps into the recording before finding full voice at the climax. The effect is riveting.
While the sequencing on Transmissions does fortify a greater understanding about Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s gift, the comp essentially ties a bow atop an established feel-good story. The same themes recur with every review, interview, and radio special: joy, acceptance, redemption, magic. What does it say about us that we’re all lusting after hope? It’s inevitable, perhaps: the coalescence around his music is a welcome unifier in an ugly age. From his belated emergence on the world stage in the wake of Keyboard Fantasies, through feature-length films and right up until this compilation’s release, people have jostled non-stop to place their hand upon this beacon of light. Glenn-Copeland has obliged each one.
