Beverly Glenn-Copeland

Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s musical work is a celebration of love in all its forms, personal, spiritual, and universal.

Across more than five decades of music, performance, and composition, he has explored the tenderness, wisdom, and connection that love carries, using voice and sound as instruments of care and devotion. Moving fluidly between jazz-folk, classical composition, and ambient electronics, the Black trans elder, singer, and composer maps the emotional landscapes of the heart, inviting listeners to reflect, feel, and embrace the enduring power of love.

In cooperation with the interdisciplinary platform Creamcake, this concert evening becomes a space for inhabiting that spirit, acknowledging that the depth of our grief in a time of collapse exists even more fully when we are able to love.

Glenn publicly affirmed his trans identity later in life, and the arc of transition echoes throughout his body of work. His songs often hold space for becoming: for vulnerability that carries strength, and for hope that does not deny complexity.

Glenn released his studio album Laughter in Summer on February 6, 2026. The album is a love letter, a deeply personal collaboration with his wife and caretaker, eco-poet and producer Elizabeth Copeland, born from and meant to remain the memory of their nearly half-century-long partnership. Described as a tender ledger of devotion, memory, grief, and joy, the record arrives as Glenn navigates LATE, a rare form of dementia. While embracing the realities of illness and aging, they explore their lifetime together, with Volksbühne as one stop along the way.

The evening reminds us that life calls us to embody the feeling of togetherness, even when it is painful: encountering loss, facing mortality, and yet discovering rituals, spaces, and practices that can offer grounding, even as experiences of fear become more frequent.

In 1986, Glenn-Copeland released the meditative Keyboard Fantasies, an ahead-of-its-time work crafted with early digital synthesizers, drum machines, and his ever-soothing soprano voice. Blending new-age textures with spiritual minimalism and science-fiction dreaming, the album quietly disappeared upon release before being rediscovered decades later. Its reissue in the late 2010s sparked an unexpected renaissance, introducing Glenn-Copeland to a new generation and reframing the record as one of the era’s most treasured rediscoveries.

That renewed attention led to his first album of new material in over twenty years, The Ones Ahead. Rather than revisiting the electronic palette of Keyboard Fantasies, the record turned toward the full breadth of his musical roots—expansive folk forms, gospel illumination, modal jazz inflections, orchestral drama, and Afro-diasporic rhythmic undercurrents. The songs move with emotional and stylistic freedom, at times intimate and devotional, at others cinematic and soaring. Throughout, his voice remains central: resonant, searching, and deeply human.

Glenn-Copeland’s artistic life has always extended beyond the recording studio. For nearly thirty years, he appeared on the beloved Canadian children’s television program Mr. Dressup, and he also wrote for Sesame Street. Since his debut in 1970, his catalogue has traveled from folksy soul-jazz beginnings to ambient electronic meditation, always guided by spiritual inquiry and a commitment to community.