Bio: PEK (Short)
PEK – The Short Bio
PEK (aka David Peck) is a multi-instrument improviser who plays all kinds of instruments including saxophones, clarinets, double reeds, percussion, electronics and auxiliary sound making devices of all kinds.
PEK was born in 1964 and started playing clarinet and piano in elementary school. In 7th grade he started saxophones, first on alto, then switching to tenor in high school. He spent 10 years playing in rock bands and studying classical and jazz saxophone with Kurt Heisig in the San Jose CA area before moving to Boston in 1989 to attend Berklee where he studied tenor saxophone performance with George Garzone. While Berklee was an excellent place to study harmony, voice training and other important aspects of a conventional formal music training course of study, it was not a very good environment for learning contemporary (or pure) improvisation (apart from his work with George). PEK did find, however, that Boston had a thriving improvisation scene, and it was here that he developed his mature pure improvisation language.
PEK met cellist Glynis Lomon when they played together in the Masashi Harada Sextet which existed between 1990 and 1992. They developed a deep musical connection which they continued following the MHS; first with the Leaping Water Trio for a few years and then with the first version of Leap of Faith in 1994. Leap of Faith was very active in Boston from that time until 2001 and went through a series of several Leap of Faith core ensembles which always included both PEK and Glynis. Other Core Unit members were Mark McGrain (trombone), Craig Schildhauer (bass), Sydney Smart (drums), Yuri Zbitnov (drums), and James Coleman. Leap of Faith was always a very modular unit with constantly shifting personnel and many different guests.
After a long hiatus from music to focus on his day job, PEK rebooted the Leap of Faith ensemble and created the larger Evil Clown project in 2015. The Evil Clown history falls into two parts: The Archival Period (1992-2001) and the Contemporary Period (2015 to the Present).
During the Archival Period, PEK also played in other settings with many active improvisors in the Boston Scene including Raqib Hassan, Eric Zinman, Raphe Malik, Dennis Warren, Glenn Spearman, B’Hob Rainey, Eric Rosenthal, Laurence Cook, George Garzone, Matt Samolis, and Martha Ritchey.
Since the beginning of the Contemporary Period (2015), PEK has accumulated a huge Evil Clown Arsenal of equipment with a grand purpose: To address a primary aesthetic problem of pure improvisation by using the large pool of instruments to make long-form broad palate works. The very broad palate enables the long improvisations to evolve with very different movements and pronounced development over their length. The Arsenal includes dozens of horns, heavy orchestral percussion, electronics and many other instruments.
PEK’s label, Evil Clown, is documenting the ongoing solutions to this aesthetic challenge by creating limited CD editions and digital download albums of every performance and studio session by Leap of Faith and an array of related ensembles. All of the bands are highly modular, changing personnel and instrumentation with each meeting. The result is an enormous amount of music that shares the same fundamental improvisational language but differs from event to event greatly both in sonority (overall sound) and specific detail.
Leap of Faith has continued to be the main and most productive project, but a number of bands were formed with different aesthetic intent. Those ensembles are Leap of Faith Orchestra, Leap of Faith Orchestra & Sub-Units, Metal Chaos Ensemble, Turbulence, Turbulence Doom Choir, Turbulence Orchestra, Axioms, PEK Solo, Simulacrum, Perturbations, Expanse, Sub-Unit No. 1, String Theory, Mekaniks, and Chicxulub. There is a Roster of active musicians which generally contains roughly 50 players, most of whom participate in multiple projects.
Between the Contemporary and Archival Periods, Leap of Faith and the other Evil Clown ensembles have produced nearly 400 albums! The Yearly Performance Pages on this site list the albums from each year with links to the Evil Clown Album Page, the bandcamp page, the Squidco page, the YouTube page, the soundcloud page, performers with links to their bios, and any reviews which are published on the web. Many reviews written by Bruce Lee Gallanter and Darren Bergstein for Downtown and some other writers which are not easily addressable with a URL are included on this site on the album page.
Here are links to the existing Performance Pages at the time of this writing in January of 2024.
2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024
PEK – 1/11/2024
Rob Miller Photos
