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.

Evil Clown Ensembles are assigned the “Orchestra” suffix when the ensemble size reaches 8.  Sometimes our Orchestral performances have much larger band sizes, but 8 or 9 is as many players as I can fit into Evil Clown Headquarters.  Classical “Orchestras” are much larger, although chamber orchestras might have as few as 12 or 15 musicians.  To me the defining characteristic of an Orchestra is sub sections that share timbre sets and interact together and in units with the other sections.  Improvisation ensembles reach this level of complex organization at about 8 musicians and that is why my naming scheme works the way it does…  The Evil Clown Roster generally contains about 50 players who participate in the many different ongoing ensembles.  Evil Clown Ensembles are not fixed to a specific group of people, but rather to an aesthetic problem and perhaps a core unit.  A session is generally credited to LOFO when it has Glynis and me and the aesthetic problem is orchestral improvisation. 

Albey onBass has been one of our beloved bassists who for a long time was splitting time equally between the Boston and NYC areas.  For the last couple of years, he has been mostly in New York, and we have seen him a lot less.  Glynis and I played a lot with Tor Snyder (guitar) in ensembles of Raqib Hassan in the 90s.  He later moved to New York, and we lost touch…  Dennis Warren (drums) also used to play with Raqib and is now located in Western Mass.   When I was discussing having Tor trek up for a session, I asked Albey also and I found a time they could both come.  As I have done in the past, when someone comes in from far outside of town, I schedule several sessions so they can get in on a few sets while they are in town.  Originally, Albey was going to do the Saturday set, Sentence Types and Tokens, and Tor was going to do Saturday and Sunday, Problems of Time and Causality, but Albey’s plans changed slightly, and he was able to do both sets.

Problems of Time and Causality was originally scheduled for 8 performers, then 9 with the addition of Albey.  As often happens with larger units, we had some other last-minute changes.  Our drummer had a scheduling confusion and had the wrong date in his book, and our second guitarist was ill and made a late withdrawal.  No worries!  Here at Evil Clown we can roll with these kind of personnel rearrangements easily…  I really only had a few hours to find another drummer and I was not able to do it – that would kill a lot of sessions for more conventional music, but improvisation generally is not so reliant on conventional instrumentation and Leap of Faith, in particular, has a long history of performance without drummers.  For most of the Archival Period in the 90s and half of the Contemporary Period since 2015, the Leap of Faith core unit has not included a drummer as a regular member.  Not having a drummer makes a more “chamber” vibe and since the studio has so many percussion instruments available to everyone for doubling there is still a significant percussion presence without a player at the drum set.

For the Sunday set, I engaged Evil Clown regular John Fugarino (brass) and relative newbie Cliff White (reeds) for the horn section.   The string section is made up of Glynis, Tor and two bassists Albey on fretless electric bass and Scott Samenfeld on upright electric bass.  This septet is not quite large enough to qualify for the “Orchestra” suffix. So, the ensemble name flipped back to Leap of Faith instead of the LOFO.   The base dynamic of this set is strings and horns with plenty of other sounds coming from the auxiliary percussion and electronic instruments throughout the studio.  With this great string section and broad doubling horn section, the ensemble transforms through a huge number of sonorities over the duration of the work.

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

PEK, 3/17/2025