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.

Currently the Evil Clown Roster has about 50 performers in it and one of the main aesthetic problems we routinely tackle is broad palette improvisation by larger ensembles.  Most pure improvisation units are small – duets and trios are really common.  Quartets and quintets also are common, but less so.  Larger units happen, but with even less frequency.  Most of the Contemporary Period Evil Clown performances have at least 5 players.  I can fit 8 or 9 people in the Evil Clown Headquarters Studio (a few more under certain circumstances), and many of our current sets have 7 to 9 players. 

Pinpoint Diffractions is a sextet, a very common unit size for Evil Clown sessions.  We have our 4 most prominent featured soloists (PEK, Glynis Lomon, Michael Caglianone and John Fugarino) with bassist Scott Samenfeld and the unusual percussion of Michael Knoblach.  The front-line quartet from this band played an Avant Garde Festival performance last fall with a narrow palate, horn players just a few horns each and Glynis on her usual cello, aquasonic, voice.  This was a great performance, very tight, by a very strong quartet really moving together through a short 20-minute piece.  I knew that this quartet at Evil Clown Headquarters with the broader palette and the excellent rhythm section of Scott and Michael K would kill it and I was not disappointed. 

We were a bit lucky with the weather…  I used to schedule much less during the winter months when most of our performances were in public venues, since nearly every year I had to cancel at least one show due to snow storms.  Global warming is helping us out in the Boston area in the winter – we still get precipitation in about the same amount, but less of it is snow and it warms up in between and the snow melts…  Bad for the planet, but good for the Evil Clown Calendar.  Anyway, Joel will be on tour again with Nektar for the whole month of April and unavailable to engineer ECH sessions, so I have been very aggressive with the scheduling trying to get as many sets in the book as possible before Joel is out of Town.  We recorded 4 albums in January no problem, and this show had a near miss with a storm that started in earnest a few hours after the set completed…   Whew!

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

PEK 2/9/2025