Legendary Musician Releasing His First Album in 20 Years
Beverly Glenn-Copeland has announced his first LP in two decades. The Ones Ahead is a new studio album due for release on July 28 through Transgressive Records. It will be the 79-year-old experimental composer's first piece composed solely from original material since his 2004 album, Primal Prayer, released under the pseudonym Phynix. It is a follow-up to a 2021 remix album dedicated to his popular 1986 LP, Keyboard Fantasies, which was released to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the record.
In a statement, he explained the inspiration behind the album opener "Africa Calling": "In the '80s, I had the honor of performing with an incredible artist named Dido, a master of the drums indigenous to West Africa. The beauty of this drumming tradition is explored in 'Africa Calling.' Over the years, in many conversations, I have come to understand that I share an undefinable, unnamed feeling—a calling—with many other members of the African diaspora, a bone-deep need to explore and express our heritage. Alongside the grief, there is a longing to know our roots, hidden from us as family lines were torn apart in the terrible days of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In a world still caught in the ties of colonialism, I know I am not alone in needing to heed the call of this generations-old longing."
In 2020, Glenn-Copeland released Transmissions: The Music of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, which featured new material. The following year, he released a remix album that included contributions from Kelsey Lu, Arca, Devonté Hynes, and many others to commemorate the 35th anniversary of his celebrated LP Keyboard Fantasies, as well as a reissue and a documentary, Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story.
Glenn-Copeland spoke with The Creative Independent in 2020, in which the musician was asked, among other things, about when he knows a song is finished. "I can tell you exactly, and this is a really good lesson that I had to learn," Glenn-Copeland began. "The song gets sent in some format or another, and I add to it what I think is mine to add to flesh out what was being sent. At a certain point, what I've noticed is if I get into this space where I think, 'Oh, and I need to add this, and then I need to add that,' which is not really coming from the song, but from my own ego."
He added, "I don't mean that in a negative way, but just it's just coming from me, it's not the impulse of the music itself, then inevitably it starts sounding terrible to my ears. I've lost a couple pieces because of that. My motto is to try to stay very sensitive to when the piece is expressing what it came to express, and that I have augmented to make sure that it can be understood, but that I haven't taken it off someplace that it had no intention of going. I really believe that everything is alive in some format or another because there is nothing but the universe, and everything in it is alive, and that's just the reality of it when you get down to molecules," he told the outlet. "It's all alive, it's all moving and changing."