The finding of a new audience in recent years for Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s 1986 record Keyboard Fantasies, with the Reimagined version of that album in 2019, inspired a renewed creativity: The Ones Ahead is their first studio release in almost 20 years.
It is perhaps instructive to know that some of its songs started life as part of song cycles or stage plays, as there is something quite heightened about much of the album, an amplified emotional register that underpins many subjects: ancestors, climate change, the threads that bind.
A sense of peaceful joy is the scaffolding here, with Africa Calling a case in point. Inspired by the time Glenn-Copeland spent in the 1980s with a musician who used drums indigenous to west Africa, it is a sensuous, rousing call to the past and what Glenn-Copeland terms “generations-old longing”, peppered with a Graceland-era Paul Simon fleck.
Harbour (Song for Elizabeth) is an album highlight. Rooted in old-fashioned romanticism – ”don’t you know that you’re the quest my heart was seeking?” – it brings to mind a glassy-eyed Cole Porter. People of the Loon, with its lovely brass, is dramatic and stirring, finding an echo in the strident No Other. Stand Anthem employs a choir of voices that soar and swoop. Prince Caspian’s Dream is a floating piece, a companion to Harbour.
Glenn-Copeland has previously said they “receive transmissions” from vibrations of the world, “and like a good servant, I listen and write what I am given”. The Ones Ahead is another mysterious milestone.
