keyboard fantasies: the beverly glenn-copeland story (2019) dir. posy dixon

Right from the start of his career, Beverly Glenn-Copeland (1944) was an outsider: the only black classical music student at the McGill music academy in Canada, as well as one of few open homosexuals at a time – the early 1960s – when this was still a criminal offence. For a long time, Glenn-Copeland lived as a lesbian woman – until he realised he was transgender. The folk-jazz records Glenn-Copeland recorded in the early 1970s went largely unnoticed, as did the album of electronic new age music he issued on cassette in 1986: Keyboard Fantasies. Three decades later, this was rediscovered and reissued by a Japanese record collector. The gentle, engaging Glenn-Copeland talks in the film about the friction with his parents, but also about the spirituals his mother taught him. We also see how, at the age of 74, he finally gets the recognition his music deserves: performing to sell-out venues, including at Utrecht’s Le Guess Who? festival.