Upon its release in 1986, Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Keyboard Fantasies “sounded like it was recorded in a future that hadn’t yet come to pass,” writes Bijan Stephen. Three decades later, the album’s unlikely rediscovery brought new appreciation to a musician whose work is “very clearly the product of a lifetime of moral thinking.” Stephen’s appreciation casts Glenn-Copeland as an artist at once deeply concerned with his time and yet operating outside its usual boundaries.
There’s an anecdote that Glenn-Copeland has shared with a few interviewers: when he was young a fortune teller told him he wouldn’t be successful until he was very old. He was seventy-one the year Keyboard Fantasies was rediscovered and made him into a world-touring musician. Perhaps that mystic had seen something in him for which we didn’t yet have the words, something for which the world would have to wait. But I don’t think it’s wise to put too much stock in what a person behind a crystal ball says, if only because imagining what-ifs can easily distract you from the business of living. The present is all we really have, and it is an astonishing, impossible gift. And that’s Glenn-Copeland’s great subject—the beautiful improbability that we are all here together. Finding his music again feels right because it’s a connection we sorely needed and nearly missed.Â
Great music writing from The New York Review of Books
She Knows a Place
“For seven decades, the gospel singer Mavis Staples has troubled the opposition between chorus and soloist, background and lead.”
The Docteur Is In
“The Congolese rumba pioneer Docteur Nico helped define the sound of African decolonization—and became one of the great visionaries of the electric guitar.”
Harmony
“You can practice a song a thousand times and still its first note sends you into the unknown.”
