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.

Evil Clown records roughly 3 albums a month – mostly YouTube Livestreams from Evil Clown Headquarters, but also some live performances.  Prior to the pandemic, most Evil Clown performances were concerts – I had a residency that ran for many years at Outpost 186 in Cambridge MA on the 3^rd Saturday of the month.  There are some significant advantages to Livestreaming over live performances, notably we get more audience, and I don’t have to haul equipment which is not such a big deal if I’m just bringing a couple of horns and recording equipment, but I used to bring a full van of gear to support the broad palette approach which is trivial to do at Evil Clown Headquarters.

However, live performance has advantages also.  There is a direct line of communication between the performers and the audience, which is absent in streaming, so we do some public shows, but I’m picky and we don’t do as many.  I also get plenty of opportunities to do the broad palette concept at ECH, so I don’t mind using more focused resources for live performances.  Each performance is a solution to an aesthetic problem posed by the members of the ensemble, the instrumental resources available, the properties of the space and other attributes of the environment. 

About a year ago, I got a facebook message from Adam Arritola, someone who I did not know from Rochester New York.  He is a young man who is broadly hooked into Avant Garde music of all different kinds.  He has had a series of festivals over the last several years including one last year in Rochester where he had events over the course of a week in different venues around Rochester.  He indicated in his message that he was planning to radically expand his concept and wanted his Avant Garde A Clue 2024 festival to have 100 or more acts over the course of a week.  He asked if we would like to participate.

It’s a long trek from Boston (a 7-hour drive) but I decided that it sounded like fun, although it was going to be a lot of travel for a short set, I told Adam I would bring a group.  I invited a tight group of hardcore Leap of Faith regulars – Glynis Lomon (cello, aquasonic, voice), Albey onBass, and horn players John Fugarino (trumpets) and Michael Caglianone (saxophones).  Ultimately, Adam booked 250 acts for the festival, which meant that the sets were about 20 minutes for each act.  Also, Albey eventually had a conflict so Leap of Faith presented a quartet.

The short duration and the focused palette produced a different kind of vibe than is typical for our longer improvisations involving more instruments, but this quartet has played really a lot in various Evil Clown Ensembles, and we were really tight.  Most of the other acts were not from the free jazz side of the world of improvisation.  Many were noise or industrial oriented and others were more rock world improvisation styles, with only a few free jazz artists like our pals Bonnie Kane & John Loggia who were on the same night we were. 

It was very interesting to present our highly developed mature acoustic instrumental improvisation style to an audience composed mostly of fans of more modern noise oriented / more pop culture Avant Garde styles of performance.  I’ve often thought that people who like these musics probably have not been exposed much to improvisation on acoustic instruments and that there is potential to find new listeners in that population.  It was very interesting to perform for such a different crowd and we were very well received.

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

PEK 10/14/2024