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.

Leap of Faith sessions come in a variety of flavors – sometimes the ensemble is very large, sometimes just a duet, sometimes with lots of strings, sometimes with lots of horns, sometimes with lots of percussion, and sometimes with more balanced instrumental resources.  Nowadays, the Evil Clown Roster has about 50 members, so most of the sessions for most of the ensembles run to the larger size…  Evil Clown Headquarters can fit 8 players when we have drums and a few more when we do not.  Most of the contemporary sets at ECH have between 6 and 8 performers.

Over the 30 years since Leap of Faith first hit, we have had periods where the ensemble was more often trio or quartet and where we did not include a drummer in the lineup.  I think of a drummerless band as a chamber ensemble – the overall character of the improvisation takes on a different vibe – typically there is more space and a quieter dynamic which lets the smaller sounds breathe…  Glynis and I enjoy these smaller units because they produce a very different soundspace for our interactions and they broaden the range of our output, so I make sure that I schedule some small unit sets as part of the schedule.

Disentangling the Spin was performed by chamber quartet.  Glynis and me with John Fugarino (brass) and Cliff White (saxophones).  Glynis, John and I go back to the very early 90s when we played together in the Masashi Harada Sextet and some other settings.  When that band stopped, Glynis and I formed Leap of Faith, but we lost track of John until I ran into him again on facebook in 2022.  Since then John has been one of our most hard-core regulars, appearing on several sessions per month on average.   Cliff is a relative newbie who first performed at one of the recent Brattleboro VT performances of Turbulence Orchestra & Sub-Units.  He lives in western MA, but has made the trek east to Boston several times for Evil Clown Headquarters for LIVESTREAM performances.

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

PEK 5/26/2025