Liner Notes by PEK

Leap of Faith is the core duet of the Leap of Faith Orchestra (LOFO) comprised of PEK on clarinets, saxophones, clarinets & flutes, and Glynis Lomon on cello, aquasonic & voice.  The ensemble is based in Boston and dates back to the early 90s.  We utilize a huge arsenal of additional Evil Clown instruments to improvise long works featuring transformations across highly varied sonorities.   At times, the core unit has been a trio or even a quartet.  The longest running core unit was comprised of PEK, Glynis and drummer Yuri Zbitnov, who played for the last couple of years of the archival period and the first 5 years of the reboot starting in 2015.  The ensemble has always been highly modular, and our many recordings (well over 100) feature the core unit in dozens of configurations with a huge list of guests and occasionally as only the core unit with no guests.  Currently, the core unit is the duet of PEK and Lomon and we are regularly presenting LIVESTREAMs to YouTube from Evil Clown Headquarters with other guest performers.

Due to the pandemic, and the associated lack of appropriate venue for larger ensembles, the Leap of Faith Orchestra has not performed in a while.  Generally, I add Orchestra to the name of any of the ensembles when the group is 8 or more performers, so this session with 9 players counts.  Our very special guests for this set are Jimmy Zhao, Yazhi Gao and Tao He on Chinese instruments.  Jimmy has been on two Evil Clown recordings for the Expanse Meets the JMDE Quartet albums (Scope and Span).  For those performances, he brought a broad range of Chinese Instruments and a few Western ones…  The rest of the performers besides Michael Knoblach on percussion and myself on my usual arsenal are all strings (Glynis Lomon – vc, Tom Swafford – vln, Kit Demos – b, Steve Skop – b).  While Yuri Zbitnov was in the core Leap of Faith, String Theory is the name of the ensemble when Glynis and I performed without the drum set and with other string players.  Bounded and Finite Extents is conceptually the offspring of String Theory plus the Chinese guests and Michael on his unusual collection of percussion.  For this edition of the LOFO I have titled the ensemble the Leap of Faith Chinese Orchestra…  Not because it is like a traditional Chinese Orchestra, but because it is Leap of Faith Orchestra with a strong Chinese element.

Large improvisation ensembles create a tricky aesthetic problem.  Without preplanning, many times big impov bands generate a wall-of-sound, which as it continues, does not display much development.  My broad palette approach, along with a general direction to the players to spend about a third of the total duration laying out, is designed to address this difficulty.  With the musicians changing instruments and the ensemble size shrinking and swelling throughout the work, the sonority undergoes dramatic transformation, the sequence of which is the form of the piece emergent from the decisions of the improvisors.

I had really been looking forward to this set and I was not disappointed…  Everyone had their big ears on and really listened to each other.  The combination of Evil Clown regulars with newbies and relative newbies from very different cultural origins really produced a striking and unique contribution to the Leap of Faith Orchestra’s catalog.

I really like this set, and I bet you will too…

PEK 9/2/2022