Beverly Glenn-Copeland Announces 'Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined'

Earlier this year, Transgressive reissued American-Canadian composer and activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland's 1986 masterpiece, Keyboard Fantasies, marking the 35th anniversary of its original release. Today, he announces, Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined - a collection of songs from the now legendary album, re-worked and re-imagined by a collection of creative kindred spirits. To mark the occasion, today "Ever New (Kelsey Lu's Transportation)" is available everywhere. Watch the visualizer here. The album is available for pre-order today.

Kelsey Lu on Ever New:

"I feel so honored and completely heart struck to have been able to dive further into the fabric of Glenn's music, especially 'Ever New,' which is a song that when I first heard it, sprung up emotions of grace, hope and care within the ever-evolving cycles of growth, so that's what I tried to bring into the making of this reimagining as well."

"Beverly Glenn-Copeland's masterwork from 1986 is a hermetic and wondrous new age album that contains worlds beyond worlds," Pitchfork said. "I am profoundly grateful to all who have supported the music of Keyboard Fantasies during these last years, with special appreciation to my wife Elizabeth," says Glenn. "Though written over thirty years ago, I have listened to your recent musings about the hope the music inspires and the calm it brings, finally understanding that the transmissions sent through me from what I call the Universal Broadcasting System are helping to accomplish the UBS's purpose, namely that of bringing us together as a single human family at last. For this I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. Blessings."

The remix album and reissue of the original work follows the release of Glenn's album, Transmissions: The Music of Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Transmissions was a career-spanning album that includes compositions from his early works including selections from Keyboard Fantasies. It also included both new and archival unreleased tracks and live versions. This collection marked the first new release from Glenn-Copeland since 2004. The New York Times called it a "life-spanning mixtape that moves from the mournful torch songs of his youth to joyously soulful odes to survival. There are dances and dirges, reimagined gospel standards and radiant organ jams. But mostly, there are songs for pressing on, anthems for keeping the faith in yourself."

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. Read Pitchfork's Sunday Review of Keyboard Fantasies here.

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.

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.'

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