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.

This unit is sextet, which is a common size for Leap of Faith ensembles. Glynis and I are joined by Bonnie Kane (ts, fl, & electronics) and John Loggia (d) who play together all the time and who came in from western MA and Southern VT for the set. I have been working at merging with their scene for some years now and we perform fairly frequently at Bonnie’s series in Holyoake and at John’s Venue in Brattleboro and some of those players come in for sessions at Evil Clown Headquarters.

In fact, we met violinist Tom Swafford a year or two before the pandemic at Bonnie’s previous venue in Holyoake. I was blown away by his solo performance and found that he was planning to move from Brooklyn to Providence RI which is much closer to us here (near Boston). We arranged to hook up, but it took some time for it to occur due to the virus… Anyway, this is Tom’s ninth session with us, so he is a somewhat infrequent contributor since he is so busy, but he is always welcome when he can make it.

Rounding out the sextet is John Fugarino. 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.

All Evil Clown recordings solve the aesthetic problem posed by the performance space, players, and musical resources available over the seventy-minute planned duration. This sextet edition of Leap of Faith appears for the first time on Independent Variables, but the common experience between various sub-units of the group and the advanced improvisational sensitivity of the performers, and the resources in the Evil Clown Studio Environment prompted a unique and distinctive solution.

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

PEK, 5/5/2026