Bourse de Commerce and independent festival Ideal Trouble present a concert by Beverly Glenn-Copeland, an American born Canadian composer, singer, and pioneering figure of the trans community, whose work - carried by a deep, haunting voice - develops a singular language at the intersection of ambient electronic music, jazz, classical music, and psychedelic folk.
Born into a family of musicians in the United States, Beverly Glenn-Copeland studied the classical piano repertoire from an early age, listening to his father play for several hours each day. In the early 1960s, he left his hometown of Philadelphia to move to Montreal, where he studied classical music at McGill University, becoming one of the first Black students admitted. Very early on, he felt the need to move beyond academic frameworks in order to create a music that could connect the multiple sonic traditions he encountered and cherished.
After several decades of obscurity, his cult album Keyboard Fantasies (1986), self-produced and entirely recorded on synthesizers in northern Canada, was rediscovered in 2015, revealing to a wider audience the singularity of a visionary artist then over 70 years old. Thirty years after its release, a Japanese collector and record dealer accidentally came across the cassette, fell deeply in love with it, and sought to contact the artist to find out whether any copies still existed. This rediscovery led to a reissue of the record, a forward-looking electronic work where New Age minimalism, the early outlines of Detroit techno, and the warmth of traditional folk songwriting intertwine.
Founded in 2018 by Etienne Blanchot, Ideal Trouble develops a curatorial approach focused on exploratory music, drawing primarily from the fringes of contemporary sound. The festival has notably presented the first Paris performances of Duma, Moor Mother, and Boy Harsher. Initially based at La Station - Gare des Mines, it later expanded across Paris through collaborations and new encounters, each time reinventing itself through a distinctive musical identity. In 2022, for its fourth edition, the festival partnered for the first time with Bourse de Commerce for a concert by Angel Bat Dawid & Tha Brothahood.
