Heavy Friends
Saturday February 17th, 2018 with Heavy Ben
Special Black History Month profile on Beverly Glenn-Copeland

Remarkably deep and diverse with musical explorations in folk, jazz, new age, electronic, soul, country, African drumming... Beverly Glenn-Copeland wrote and performed World music before it was labelled as such. Born in Philadelphia, Copeland moved to Montreal in 1961 and studied classical music at McGill. During the course of his lifetime thus far, Glenn has written a large body of music for adults, music for film, three musicals for children, recorded six albums of his songs, and been the recipient of composition awards from the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, and Arts NB. Concurrent with writing compositions for adults, Glenn wrote music for children’s television programs in England, Canada, and the U.S such as Sesame Street. He also had the wonderful opportunity to spend twenty-five years entertaining kids as a regular actor on the Mr. Dress-Up Show. He is best known for his 1970 self-titled LP on GRT recorded with jazz luminaries Lenny Breau, Jeremy Steig, Terry Clark and Doug Riley, and for his 1986 electronic solo album Keyboard Fantasies, recorded using a Yamaha DX7, Roland TR-707 and voice. Recorded in Huntsville, ON, the latter was a cassette only release that was essentially ignored for decades, but was selected as one of the 70 greatest recordings by a women by "The Stranger". Because of the success of the re-release on LP, Glenn has been called back to the performing stage. He is a trans man, hence the references to he/his. Recent works are under the name Glenn rather than Beverly. Today's program includes snippets of an interview held in Montreal in 2017 by the Red Bull Music Academy.