Liner Notes by PEK

The core Leap of Faith ensemble is comprised of PEK on clarinets, saxophones, double reeds & flutes, and Glynis Lomon on cello, aquasonic & voice.  The ensemble is based in the Boston area and dates 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, we regularly present LIVESTREAMs to YouTube from Evil Clown Headquarters with other guest performers.

I planned Perceptual Inferences around the availability of Tom Swafford, one of our star violinists. Tom is amazing, but he lives one state over in Rhode Island and he is generally very busy, so he only gets over to Evil Clown Headquarters about twice a year on average. This is his 10^th set with us since his first in 2022. One of the Aesthetic Problems we address here is large ensemble improvisation – a challenging and exciting artistic exercise. The last several sessions that Tom has come to have been with larger ensembles with drummers – a far denser more energy focused solution than our original set with him which was a PEK/Lomon/Swafford trio.

I decided to do a smaller format chamber improvisation. In the Evil Clown nomenclature, a chamber set is one that has no bass and drums which immediately make it less like free jazz and more like pure improvisation. Leap of Faith has had a few outstanding chamber performances recently including at the North American New Arts Festival just a few weeks ago. That show was also quintet with clarinetist Kelsey Gallagher in place of Tom. I was hoping to also book my other primary violinist of the moment, Jonathan LaMaster, but he is also very busy, and I could not get that to happen. It would have been great since I love large string sections and three orchestral strings/three horns is a great balanced instrumentation for a chamber pure improvisation.

In larger ensembles, the melodic instrument voices engage in a lot of motivic deployment and improvised counterpoint. Glynis, Mike, John and I have played so much together that this discourse is highly tuned. A gifted improvisor such as Tom has no difficulty coming into this environment and shining. Without the other instrumentation of the larger ensembles, the tight interactions between the melodic voices are emphasized. We are still in the ECH studio, however, so there are a lot of other sounds from percussion, electronics and rubber chickens to complete the palate.

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

• PEK, 10/18/2026