Liner Notes by PEK

Leap of Faith is the core duet of the Leap of Faith Orchestra (LOFO) comprised of PEK on clarinets, saxophones, double reeds & 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.

Most current day Leap of Faith sets include at least 5 or 6 performers. I’m very interested in the Aesthetic Problem posed by large ensemble improvisation, and I have a large roster of interested qualified musicians, so most of our performance’s ensembles trend a bit bigger. Periodically, it’s great to do a smaller format more chamber set harking back to our early trio period in the 90s.

John, Glynis and I go way back… We played together for a few years in the Masashi Harada Sextet in the early 90s. Glynis and I went on to form the Leaping Water Trio and then Leap of Faith and we lost track of John. In 2022, as we came out of the pandemic, I reconnected with John on facebook, and he is now my most regular regular at Evil Clown, performing with essentially all the different ensembles. His first Evil Clown set in April 2022 was Turbulence Orchestra – Wind Shear. The second was Leap of Faith – Coherent Alternatives with the exact same trio as today – Glynis, john and me. John has appeared on 84 Evil Clown albums in the 4 years since, 31 with Leap of Faith, so the 3 of us are really tight with each other…

This trio has performed as a trio with no others only on three previous occasions: Coherent Alternatives (6/11/22), Action as Thought, Thought as Action (7/28/2022), and Interconnected by Testable Relations (11/18/2023). It’s always interesting to revisit previous configurations after some time has passed and further development has occurred in other contexts. Several things are different since this trio’s earlier sets: the new Evil Clown Studio is complete, and John has expanded his brass playing to include French horn and his playing generally to the Evil Clown Studio Instrument (what I call the collection of instruments permanently available in the space).

Anyway, I really like this performance, and I bet you will too…

PEK, 4/12/2026