Excerpt from Bruce Lee Gallanter Review

“…Without the drums, things are more sparse, yet still somehow magical, floating through space. The septet is often sparse with the cello & percussion interweaving layers underneath. Eventually different subgroups emerge: amazing interaction between both trumpets, trombone, saxes & cello. Yet another OUTstanding from the super prolific Leap of Faith crowd.”

Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery

Liner Notes by PEK

Leap of Faith is the core trio of the Leap of Faith Orchestra (LOFO) comprised of PEK on clarinets, saxophones, double reeds & flutes, Glynis Lomon on cello, aquasonic & voice, and Yuri Zbitnov on drums & percussion. 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. The ensemble has always been highly modular and our many recordings feature the core trio in dozens of configurations with a huge list of guests.

This particular performance was originally intended to be Leap of Faith Orchestra and Sub-Units – First Principles. We do the Orch + Sub-Units performances every other month at Third Life Studios in Somerville MA. I arrange the dates far in advance, and this one happened to line up with the Union Square porch fest which drew an enormous crowd, completely jamming the streets and blocking traffic. Susan, who runs the space, let me know it was going on earlier in the day, so I went very early – a good thing, since it took a full hour to go around one block to get to the closest load in point. In fact, I did not see how I was going to be able to unload my van full of equipment at all and I emailed Susan from my phone that I might have to cancel. Gradually, I crawled up the street with the other blocked traffic, and then at the last second, just as I got there, the car in the best possible parking spot left!!! So, I parked and unloaded.

Others from the group also had difficulty, even several hours after the end of the formal porch fest event, so we ended up postponing the start of the concert by an hour and changing the format of the performance. We usually do an hour’s worth of shorter (15 or 20 minute) improvisations by small sub-units of the orchestra, followed by a 50 minute set with everyone. Since, for this show, we were smaller than usual and an hour late, I decided to a single 70 minute full length set with everyone, which is the format we typically follow at small ensemble shows presented monthly at Outpost 186 in Cambridge. Seven or Eight players is almost, but not quite large enough, to qualify as an LOFO show, so I decided to categorize this ensemble as Leap of Faith.

The seven players on this session are all hard-core Evil Clown regulars. I love it when this happens, since everyone is familiar with the auxiliary instruments I bring, which leads to very broad transformations between sonorities. Also, there are multiple paths of long prior history between various sub-groups of the players going back decades. We did not have a drummer on traps, so the percussion sounds come from the rest of the players on the auxiliary instruments. Leap of Faith’s earliest formats both were drummerless, so we do well with no drummer as the overall sound takes on a more chamber / orchestral quality that one does not typically get with a drum set.

This hardcore Leap of Faith large chamber set demonstrates very well the Evil Clown broad-pallet aesthetic.