Liner Notes by PEK

Albey onBass and Jane SpokenWord were associated with Cecil Taylor’s final trio. Following Cecil’s passing they were in Boston for about a year in 2017-2018 and Albey performed a dozen or so times with Leap of Faith, Metal Chaos Ensemble and Turbulence. In November 2018, Albey and I had been discussing doing a duet, but we decided to include Jane’s poetry as a trio. This new Evil Clown Ensemble we called Axioms, which to me is an apt name for a band which features words – something that most Evil Clown sessions do not.

There are two definitions:

1) a statement or proposition that is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true

2) a statement or proposition on which an abstractly defined structure is based (mathematics)

These two meanings bridge the distance between poetic discussion of truths and abstract musical structures.

A few months later, about a year before the virus, Albey and Jane moved to New Orleans, so the original session from December 2018, Manifestations, had been our only recording to date.

Back in July 2021, soon after I reopened Evil Clown Headquarters for YouTube streaming performances / recordings (following the time when musicians could be fully vaccinated for the virus), Albey reached out saying that he and Jane would be in the Boston area for a few weeks, and we recorded Hypotheses a few days later.  Now, Albey and Jane are back and forth between New York and Boston, so they are in town quite frequently and Axioms has done three Livestreams this year and Albey has done a bunch of other sets with the other Evil Clown Ensembles.

In fact, Albey was supposed to be in town last week for a Perturbations set (an instrumental duet with heavy real-time signal processing from house engineer Joel Simches).  He had to withdraw from that since he was needed in New York and saxophonist Michael Caglianone took the second instrumental chair for that set – we produced a great show that was very different than it would have been with Albey.  As I am getting ready to do some construction on the house to greatly improve the studio, I’ve scheduled a lot of back-to-back sessions, but Albey and Jane were going to be back in town this week and there was a small hole in the schedule, so we added last night as a last second booking.  Due to the late arrangement, I did not call Glynis Lomon, who has been on most of the recent Axioms sets, and we proceeded this session as a trio.

So, Let the Following be Postulated is a return to the trio format of the first few Axioms’ performances.  I expected,  and did notice,  that my interactions with Albey have significantly deepened over the many times we have played together mostly in larger groups.  Often, when players improvise together in larger groups this deep interaction develops, and then when the group is smaller again, the deepness of the connection becomes more apparent.

This is a terrific performance of improvisation with poetry by this small powerful trio edition of Axioms…  I really like this set and I bet you will also!

PEK – 25 August 2022