Beverly Glenn-Copeland
The Ones Ahead
Transgressive Records
28 July 2023
In 2013, Beverly Glenn-Copeland and his wife, Elizabeth, worked with American youth groups to create an eco-play. In response to a quote about the oceans dying, a cast member stood up tearfully and asked, “Why aren’t the adults doing anything?”
In the same week that English politicians kowtow to anti-green voters, Glenn-Copeland releases The Ones Ahead, his first major album in two decades. While it’s far from being just an environmental broadside, this record does have the future of humanity at heart. A blend of searching ballads and upbeat song-sermons, the music herein also speaks to Glenn-Copeland’s West African heritage. Nowhere more so than the opening cut Africa Calling with its energetic vibrations fuelled by percussive patterns. Tuneful scat chanting lends a spiritual swing, as polyrhythms enhance the dramatic potency of Glenn-Copeland’s voice. Maturity has lifted his careworn vocals into a more devotional frame, with Buddhism a key focus for him.
Now in his late seventies, Glenn-Copeland publicly identified as a transgender man in his fifties. And it’s to his wife, Elizabeth, that the next track is dedicated. The couple first met in 1992 and were married in 2009. Harbour Song (For Elizabeth) is a devotional ballad with a nostalgic quality in its Sondheim-like melody. Glenn-Copeland offers a show-stopping vocal turn that has strength and vulnerability over a piano, thumped bass and brushed cymbals. Love Takes All follows, where the grandeur of a keyboard intro signals a stark reflection on mortality. ‘These old bones, they know/Soon in death, must go’, sighs Glenn-Copeland, his vocals full of compassion.
People Of The Loon opens on dramatic kettle drums and brass fanfares, like a cavalry charge. Into the mix comes a choral mass in the solemn refrain, ‘Come a little bit closer/Hear us, hear us’, expressing the desire of all repressed social groups. Stand Anthem goes back to the aforementioned eco-play, with African percussion again bringing chaos and cosmos into alignment. There’s a joyous defiance here, a creation ritual, as Glenn-Copeland demands, ‘Sweep the air clean of this dirty material’. Elsewhere, the title track’s ancestral theme is given depth by plummy cello, keyboard spirals and hymned gospel vocals.
In his teens, Glenn-Copeland trained as a classical singer in the German lieder style. His early 1970s albums alluded to this, as do two mysterious rhapsodies on this album in Prince Caspian’s Dream and Lakeland Angel. The closing song of praise here is No Other, which bursts like a dramatic sunrise, dawning over our shattered world.
Like a prophet in exile, Glenn-Copeland sends us messages of love, hope and resistance on The Ones Ahead. What finer witness could we seek right now?