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.

For the bulk of the Archival Period (1993 – 2001), Leap of Faith was typically a trio with no drums.  Glynis and I first played with trombonist Marc McGrain and then with bassist Craig Schildhauer.  We did occasionally have drummers including frequent guest Syd Smart and then for the last couple of years Yuri Zbitnov.  Playing without drummers creates a much more chamber music kind of vibe and decreases jazz references making the music more free improvisation and less free jazz.  In the contemporary period (2015 to the present), we more frequently have drummers and chamber improvisations are less common, but they do occur.

The Evil Clown roster is large and it takes a lot of sessions and a lot of juggling to book all of the interested musicians and as a consequence most of the Evil Clown ensembles have 5 or more performers with bass and drums.  We specialize in this very interesting and difficult aesthetic problem of larger improvisation ensembles and we are very good at it, but I take special care to occasionally book small chamber ensembles that look back to our origins. 

Glynis and I played with John Fugarino for a couple of years in the Masashi Harada Sextet in the early 90s.  We lost track of John for a long time, but in 2022 we reconnected and since then he has been a hard core Evil Clown regular performing on 30 albums in 3 years.  One of his first contemporary period sets was a June 2022 trio with me and Glynis called Coherent Alternatives.  John plays trumpet, trombone and other brass instruments, but has really learned the auxiliary instruments which are at Evil Clown Headquarters that we use to broaden the palette…

Glynis and I did a trio with drummer Steve Niemitz at Bonnie Kane’s series in Western Mass just before the pandemic and met the extraordinary violinist Tom Swafford who was living in New York at that time.  Due to the stupid virus and the distance, it took a few years to get him involved, but he lives now in Providence NH which is a lot closer to Boston.  He is busy and still a bit distant, so we don’t get him that often, but he has now performed on 7 very different Leap of Faith albums in the last few years.  One of the early sets was a trio with me and Glynis called Degrees of Freedom.

When I have excellent players who participate infrequently, I plan sessions around their availability.  As I was planning Linguistic Differences around Tom’s availability on this date, I decided to do a smaller chamber improvisation combining the PEK/Glynis/John Fugarino trio with the PEK/Glynis/Tom Swafford trio to make a quartet balanced on strings and winds with two of the players (me and John) doubling the percussion, electronics, electro-acoustic and other instruments in the studio.  This is a truly excellent example of a broad palette chamber improvisation cooked up by seasoned improvisation professionals tearing it up live to YouTube from Evil Clown Headquarters…

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

• PEK 8/14/2024