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 (now over 150) feature the various core units 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.

One of the recent Evil Clown projects is the Leap of Faith Chinese Orchestra which has recorded twice.  Percussionist Michael Knoblach brought Jimmy Zhao over for an Expanse meets the JMDE Quartet session.  After that Jimmy brought a larger group of Chinese musicians to the first LOFCO set.  For the second LOFCO set, he brought an even larger group of Chinese musicians including Jiaxin Wan on guzheng (Chinese zither).  I’d like to do the LOFCO sessions about twice a year, but they are very difficult to schedule.  Jiaxin is a Berklee student and will be available to us this year and perhaps next year, but eventually will likely move on from the Boston area.  I really liked her performance on the second LOFCO recording…  When I add someone whose playing I really like to the Roster who will be available for a limited window of time, I try to get them involved in as many sessions as possible.

We managed to do a Leap of Faith quartet edition with Jiaxin right before she went to China for the summer.  Graviton Propagates is the follow up to that set with the same lineup (PEK, Lomon, Moores, Wan) and the addition of a second trumpet player John Fugarino.  The ensemble does not include a drummer.  Several of the Leap of Faith core units have not included drummers…  When there is not a drummer the music takes on a chamber music character and becomes a bit less jazz than when there is a drummer.  However, the reconfigured Evil Clown Headquarters studio has a lot of percussion instruments and PEK, Moores and Fugarino each spend a significant amount of time on these auxiliary instruments, so the recording still has a significant percussion presence.  When several of the members of an Evil Clown Ensemble do a lot of doubling during a performance, the differences in the sonority across movements increase and the development becomes more pronounced.

Combining the improvisation world of Leap of Faith with a strong player from China creates a very broad sonority set and the resulting performance is an excellent example of the broad palette concept showing radical transformations across varied sonorities over the length of the work.

I like this set and I bet you will too…

PEK out 9/10/2023