Transmissions: The Music Of Beverly Glenn-Copeland
*Read the Canadian singer and composer’s recollections of the tracks on this career-spanning collection.* Beverly Glenn-Copeland possesses the kind of voice and songwriting sensibility that comes around perhaps only once a generation. A heartfelt tenor whose voice soars from the spoken rhythms of folk to the quivering vibrato of an operatic contralto, he has provided in his 60 years in music a little-known yet vitally important catalog of late-20th-century musical movements, as well as a consistently futuristic purview which has always set his creations on their own track. Emerging in the late 1960s as a classical singer, Glenn-Copeland soon had “an understanding,” as he tells Apple Music, that this was not the life he was meant to lead. There followed two beautiful folk-influenced albums on the GRT and CBC labels in 1970 before he seemed to retreat from the limelight, self-releasing synthesizer-based meditations in the 1980s and ’90s while appearing as a regular guest on children’s television and as a writer for *Sesame Street*. Following a recent crate-digger-fueled resurgence, 2020 was the perfect time for a retrospective release. “Oh, this wasn’t my idea,” he says, typically understated. “It was my label and publisher who went through all of my music and came up with these choices. They are excellent, though.” Read on for his commentary on *Transmissions*, track by track. **La Vita** “My mother had said the refrain of this song to me so much during my lifetime: ‘Enjoy your life.’ I always found it really encouraging and I really got what she meant. As far as she was concerned, you have one life on this planet and so you have to enjoy the fact that you are alive, since you will suffer, you will encounter difficulties, and you will have wonderful things happen, but you must overall just enjoy the fact that you actually had the opportunity to be alive. I woke up one morning and this song just came through. One of my very dearest friends, the late Maggie Hollis, was an incredible singer, and you can hear her on this.” **Ever New** “I have lived most of my life primarily in the woods, in the wild. These pieces on *Keyboard Fantasies* in the 1980s were created in that environment and it was speaking to me. I never go in with any idea when I write music. It just comes to me. In this particular case, I was checking out making music on computers, which was wonderful because it allowed me to actually flesh out and orchestrate the sounds that I was always hearing in my mind, inspired by that space.” **Colour of Anyhow (CBC Q Live Version)** “CBC said that they wanted to do an album with me in the late 1960s, and I was accompanied by this beautiful orchestra, mainly of classical players. At that point in time, I was thinking of myself as a folk musician and I was writing music on guitars. When you really listen to this album and the 1970 release on the GRT label, though, you hear it\'s not actually folk music. There\'s a couple things on there that are folk-influenced, but there\'s also one thing that\'s avant-garde classical music of the 20th century, there\'s stuff that\'s jazz, there’s so much difference.” **Deep River (Live at Le Guess Who?)** “I hadn\'t toured since the early ’70s and I was never with a band, I couldn\'t afford that. It became obvious that if I wanted to be able to come anywhere close to the music that was on the *Keyboard Fantasies* album live, I was going to need a group, because I didn’t want to go onstage hitting buttons and playing the computer. And so it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to get a band together for this live performance in 2018. I sing ‘Deep River’ often in live concerts because it comes from my Black tradition in the United States and we\'re still experiencing slavery now. It\'s not just Black folks, it\'s mostly women now who are being taken—thousands a day, actually. It\'s really a very sad commentary on the reality of our current situation that we still objectify people as commerce, and it’s important for me to talk to my audience about it.” **Don’t Despair** “I have lived in silence for the past 40 years, ever since I left university and I stopped taking classical music lessons. I was initially a classical singer for approximately two years, and things were going quite well; I was representing Canada at Expo 67 as a classical singer, and I was doing concerts for CBC. But I had an understanding one day that I was reliving a life that I\'d already lived. That\'s why it had all felt so familiar for me, as well as the fact that my father was a classical pianist. At that point I decided to start writing my own music and I ceased to listen to almost anything else. I wrote this in 1969 when I was in my early twenties and after I had stopped listening. It was a time when the most important thing going on for me was relationships. It was a song with a relationship in mind.” **Durocher** “This was written in 1968 and it just made its way onto my first album. The thing to understand about that record was that I was still extremely influenced by my classical tradition then. In the classical tradition, everything is bigger than life, most especially tragedy, or heart, or loss. That had been my world for so long, it was natural for me to write melodramatically in that way. But it wasn\'t until the second album, which also came out in 1970, that I actually switched to who I was at this time in terms of my musical expression.” **River Dreams** “I\'m constantly receiving music from the Universal Broadcasting System. In terms of what gets recorded, it\'s always something that suddenly comes to me when I\'m busy doing something else. Then I have to run to put it down as fast as I can and also try not to overwork it and not get overly involved. I have to allow it to be what it was when it came to me. That was the case for ‘River Dreams,’ a new composition for this album.” **This Side of Grace** “If you\'ve listened to the album that this track is on \[2004’s *Primal Prayer*\], it\'s actually a devotional record to that which is spiritually common to us all around the world. It\'s all talking about the fact that we have to look at ourselves honestly and understand that there is a universal reality. We humans may have different paths, but it\'s all coming from the same place, it\'s just translated according to our cultures.” **Sunset Village** “When I was between the ages of 12 and 17, I listened to every kind of music that existed in the world. I listened to a lot of Chinese music, music from India, Black funk music, everything I could find, as well as my father, who was playing Chopin, Brahms, and Beethoven for five hours a day on the piano. And so ‘Sunset Village’ may sound like it has ‘Eastern’ melodies to your ears, but it is just an expression of who I am. Everything on this album \[1986’s *Keyboard Fantasies*\] is all synthesizer music. The wonderful aspect of the synthesizer is that it can create sounds that no musician can. I could imagine what a star might sound like and then approximate my concept of it.” **In the Image** “I had a drum machine at the time of making this track and I loved it; I was programming it like crazy. I also had a hand drum machine that you played, and while I was jamming with it I realized it had some prerecorded things in it. I didn\'t know enough about what was going on in the world to know that they were prerecorded beats from other people, so I just began layering my own drumming on top of it, and that’s how ‘In the Image’ came to be and came to be so rhythmic.” **A Little Talk** “‘A Little Talk’ is very Buddhist in its orientation. I\'ve been practicing Buddhism for 27 years, and it really speaks more from that perspective; it has what I interpret as a Buddhist energy behind it, and the song feeds into all the different cultures of spirituality I was exploring on *Primal Prayer*.” **Montreal Main (The Buddha in the Palm)** “This is a song that I wrote for an underground movie that I was asked to score for in 1973. The film’s name is *Montreal Main*, and it still continues to have resonance today. The inclusion of this composition nods towards the different ways that my music has been created and used over the years.” **Erzili** “This track was the expression of my West African heritage. It was my own personal way of relating to my roots. I wrote all these songs for the GRT 1970 album in the course of maybe a year and a half. The producer who approached me to record them, Doug Riley, just gathered a bunch of jazz musicians and we all got into a studio. I didn\'t know who these people were, I just played them the songs and then we would record. The whole album was first takes, live off the floor. It was unheard of, and the experience was incredible. I had no concept of what brilliant company I was keeping, in their ability to hear something once and know exactly what it was and know exactly how to finesse it. It was unbelievable.”
Transmissions is a career-spanning album that includes compositions from Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s early works and his cult-status release, Keyboard Fantasies. It also includes both new and archival unreleased tracks and live versions. It includes the first pieces of newly recorded music that Glenn has released in almost 20 years with the track ‘River Dreams’. The album is nominated for Best Outlier Album at the A2IM Libera Awards. Transmissions is available now on vinyl, CD and all streaming platforms featuring extended liner notes written by Dev Hynes of Blood Orange. Stained Glass Cover Art of The Raven by Evelyn Wolff, www.wolffglass.ca
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