Excerpt from PEK Liner Notes

“…Syd has been monitoring the Evil Clown Scene via my facebook and YouTube pages and we message every once in a while, on-line.  A few months back, I suggested that we should do a NLC meets LOF set and he was interested!  Turns out he was going to be in Boston for a wedding today, so after some wrestling with the schedule, we landed on yesterday as the date for this new recording, The Energy of Now…”

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.

During my long hiatus through most of the 00s and some of the 10s, Glynis continued to be active in the improvisation scene, forming a trio (New Language Collaborative) with Eric Zinman on piano and Sydney Smart on drums that ran through that entire period until when Syd moved down to Brooklyn a few years ago.  I played with Syd in the bands of the great Raqib Hassan in the early 90s, and he was a frequent guest of the first few Leap of Faith core ensembles during that time.  Eric was one of the first improvisors from the Boston scene that I played with after moving to Boston to go to Berklee in 1989.  We had a trio with trumpeter John Fugarino who has just recently started doing Evil Clown sessions.   Berklee was a great experience, and I learned a lot about how regular jazz worked that I really wanted to understand, but it was a rotten place to study pure improvisation (apart from my work with George Garzone).  I learned that by improvising with seasoned improvisers including these folks and others…

Trumpeter Ellwood Epps was born in Toronto and has lived in Montreal until he recently moved to the Boston area full time.  For some time, he commuted back and forth between Montreal and Boston actively participated in the improvisation scenes of both areas.  One of the Boston area projects he was involved in was as a frequent guest of NLC.  I became aware of him by hearing his recordings with that unit although he also has a lot of other work.   Before the Corona Virus, both the quartet NLC and Turbulence (the horn-focused Evil Clown Ensemble) played at Suddenfest Improvisation/Experimental Festival in Dorchester MA on 14 November 2019.  I invited Ellwood to sit in on our set (Turbulence – Upheaval) and he predictably played extremely well!!  That album, Upheaval, is a distinct item in the Evil Clown Catalog in that the only instruments played by the quintet are horns…  Most of the time Turbulence also features the horn-players doubling percussion, electronics, or other instruments…  Recently, Ellwood has become an Evil Clown regular, appearing on albums by both Leap of Faith and Turbulence.

Syd has been monitoring the Evil Clown Scene via my facebook and YouTube pages and we message every once in a while, on-line.  A few months back, I suggested that we should do a NLC meets LOF set and he was interested!  Turns out he was going to be in Boston for a wedding today, so after some wrestling with the schedule, we landed on yesterday as the date for this new recording, The Energy of Now.  One of my facebook friends is Adrianna Amari who frequently posts amazing photos of nature on FB.  A while back she captioned one of those photos, “The Energy of Now”.  I immediately added this to my giant list of possible titles, and it ended up being assigned to this session.  This seasoned ensemble with an enormous amount of interconnection with each other in various settings for over 35 years really connected in this new setting at ECH with house engineer Joel Simches really capturing the moment!

I like this Set and I bet you will too.  Check it out!

7/10/2022