On Transformation Focused Improvisation:

The History and Grand Aesthetic of the Evil Clown Record Label

Essay by PEK – April 2021

Introduction| Part I: History of Evil Clown

Part II: Evil Clown’s Grand Aesthetic Problems and Solutions

Part III: Web Links to the Work of Evil Clown Ensembles

Part I

History of Evil Clown

Early PEK History | Archival Period | Contemporary Period

Pandemic Period | Looking Forward (from April 2021)

Part I:  History of Evil Clown (Early PEK History)

I started playing the clarinet in the 3rd grade, then switched to piano lessons for a few years, alto sax in Junior High and finally tenor sax and flute in High School where I was also the drum major of the marching band as a senior.  For about 5 years starting in Junior High, I studied classical and jazz saxophone with a guy named Kurt Heisig in San Jose California.

I then went to the University of California at Davis where I played in marching band for a year while majoring in Mathematics.  I quickly got tired of the Marching Band and for a year or so I did not play music.  I started taking Philosophy classes at Davis (including a course in Aesthetics which had a profound influence on my early thinking about art) and then switched to the University of California at Santa Cruz as a Philosophy major, with my good pal Jeff Mockus who was from Santa Cruz. 

Once in Santa Cruz at age 20, I encountered a band of older musicians (in their mid to late 20s) in a rock band called Thieves, Villains and Scoundrels Union, Local 12; the name refers to a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon where Boris is on strike for the Union holding a sign proclaiming, “Unfair to Local Villains.”  Disenchanted with College, although I still liked both Mathematics and Philosophy, I left school and started to play with Local 12, taking a day job at a local backpacking and camping equipment store called Western Mountaineering.

Local 12 was a transformative experience for me.  The other players were far more seasoned than I, and the material was eclectic and bent in a prog rock direction.  I formed bonds with Jim Smith the vocalist, keyboardist and songwriter and Dave Murray the bass player.  I learned a lot, but the environment was chaotic and after a few years the band dissolved.  Determined to increase my skills, I went back to Kurt Heisig for more lessons, this time taking them very seriously and spending the next 5 years in the woodshed in Santa Cruz. 

I joined another rock band called No Such Thing with my old high school buddy Mike Grialou (guitar and bass).  This band also did not last very long, but after it broke up, I continued to play with Mike in various settings including another rock band called Ring of Fire.  Mike and I created a dozen or so very experimental pieces with a four-track reel-to-reel tape machine, sometimes with Dave and Jim from Local 12.  The most important work from this period is a duet with Mike on bass and me on tenor sax and vocals called Whiskey is Wholesome (1988), a 20-minute blues jam where we both got drunker and drunker as the performance continued.  The piece features my improvised spoken (and shouted) words regarding the benefits of whisky drinking and the best recorded evidence of my improvisational language on tenor sax to date…  We also did several recording sessions of compositions that I wrote including The Safety Device (1989) for about 10 musicians.  Ironically, this early composition contained more dots (conventional staff notation) than any of my other composed works since except for some Berklee schoolwork that was never performed.

Part I – History of Evil Clown

Early PEK History | Archival Period | Contemporary Period

Pandemic Period | Looking Forward (from April 2021)

History of Evil Clown (Archival Period)

In 1989, at the age of 25, I relocated from California to Boston MA to attend the Berklee School of Music.  I had learned a lot from Kurt Heisig about how to control the tone, sound, and phrasing of saxophones, but I was still in need of formal education in music theory, ear training, composition and other topics covered at a real music college.  While there, I studied tenor sax performance with tenor sax jazz titan George Garzone.  I was one of George’s most Avant-garde students at that time and George and I had a great relationship, including performing together both at the school and in the Boston scene.

I decided that I would earn Berklee’s 2-year certificate rather than a bachelor’s degree, which I basically did in three terms, but stayed for five terms.  I was able to take only courses which interested me for those last two terms without worrying about satisfying the full degree requirements.  I doubled up on lessons with George and for the last two terms we ignored the standard prep for proficiency exams and instead played improvised duets on two tenor saxes.  From this I learned about improvisation phrasing and interaction with a master jazz musician.  To my knowledge no other Berklee student has ever used their lesson time like this.  I had no trouble with the exams since I had used Berklee scale study books in my Heisig lessons for 5 years, and so the tests were easy, and I could prepare in just the week prior with no difficulty.  I also took some advanced composition courses including one with Ken Pullig on using ideas of serialism in jazz composing.  I composed a giant work called Nucleus for this class that was never performed.

Early in the Berklee period (early 1990), I encountered a Japanese percussionist and pianist, who was studying for a master’s degree at the New England Conservatory (just down the street from Berklee), named Masashi Harada.  Masashi had performed on percussion in a trio in Berlin a few years prior with Cecil Taylor and was deeply hooked into the improvisation scene in Boston.  He also performed and recorded in an amazing trio with the saxophonist Joe Maneri (teaching at New England Conservatory at the time) and Joe’s son, now famous, violinist Mat Maneri.

While I had been interested in Jazz and Free Jazz in California, listening to Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Sun Ra, as well as the more mainstream jazz of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Gil Evans, and many others, I had not had an opportunity to play with seasoned Jazz or Improvisation performers.  The most experimental work I performed prior to that time was the tape pieces with Mike Grialou.

This changed dramatically once I joined the Masashi Harada Sextet.  That band included cellist Glynis Lomon, who I still play with today in Leap of Faith, and master drummer Lawrence Cooke.  At one performance our special guest was bassist William Parker.  Glynis had studied with Bill Dixon in his Black Music Program at Bennington College in Vermont, and Glynis and Lawrence both performed and recorded with Bill Dixon.  Masashi’s music was loosely composed with notated themes and pre-established aleatoric structures, but the content was essentially improvised.  In many ways, the education I received in this band was far more important than the one I got at Berklee, which turned out to be far squarer than I had anticipated:  Other music schools (Like New England Conservatory and Bennington) offer programs more focused on improvisation / creative music, while Berklee’s approach is much more on commercial music.  Even so, I did not regret my attendance since I wanted to understand conventional Western music’s Theory and Structure and I did learn what I wanted to know.  I learned improvisation elsewhere by playing with more experienced improvisors many of whom had studied in a new music curriculum.

While still at Berklee and playing in the Boston Improvisation Scene, I decided that I wanted to change the instruments I was using to broaden my palette.  I had bought soprano, alto, 2 tenors and baritone vintage Selmer saxophones, clarinet, and flute from Heisig in California.  I traded away the higher saxes and one of the tenors for a bass clarinet, a contrabass clarinet, and a bassoon.  The three clarinets, two lower saxes and bassoon were my instruments from this time until 2001.

Masashi organized a performance of Cecil Taylor’s composition Burning Poles performed at New England Conservatory.  The performance featured a large orchestra of many gifted improvisors from the Boston area including two Cecil Alumni:  Trumpeter Raphe Malik and tenor saxist Glenn Spearman.  They were able to give a great deal of insight into how to interpret Cecil’s composition, having played a lot in his larger units.  Cecil attended the performance, and I was able to meet him at a party held in Masashi’s loft apartment right next to Fenway Park.

When I left Berklee, I got a job at the Tower Records in Harvard Square where I worked for six years running the receiving department like I had done in California for Western Mountaineering.  In many ways, this was a crappy job, but it had a key benefit:  I was able to open and listen to essentially any recording I wanted to hear in the back room where we processed the store’s inventory.  I added another few thousand CDs to my collection and listened to every kind of music you can imagine.  I specialized in free jazz and free improvisation, modern classical music (after 1900), and world music (especially from Asia and Africa).  My work pal, Thom Jones aka Pointy Toes, introduced me to industrial music, noise music and other weird musics more from the popular culture.  I acquired a profound knowledge of music history across cultures and time.  Especially important to me was classical music after 1950 by composers John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Krzysztof Penderecki, György Ligeti, Harry Partch (among many others) and performers Arditti String Quartet (among many others) from solo to Orchestral Works. 

Post-Modern classical music breaks through all kinds of boundaries established by the Western music of the preceding centuries, essentially creating completely new musical languages, sometimes for a single composition only.  I found these sound worlds provided a rich base of influence for developing my own distinct musical language for improvisation.  The same is true of Asian and African musics which do not share rhythmic, harmonic, or melodic structures with Western music.

The other principal influence on my developing mature vocabulary was cellist Glynis Lomon from the Masashi Harada Sextet.  I learned how to respond to and imitate the amazing sounds produced by Glynis including specialized extended techniques like glissando and multiphonics.  When the MHS ended after a few years, Glynis and I committed to pursuing our playing together in our own band.  This marks the start of Evil Clown record label (1992), although it would not be called that until much later. 

Our first band, Leaping Water Trio, was a trio with sax player Sam Lobel.  After a few years, Sam left and was replaced by trombonist Mark McGrain, who had been one my teachers at Berklee (for notation and composition using non-traditional notation), and we renamed the ensemble Leap of Faith.  We were occasionally joined by bassist Craig Schildhauer and drummer Syd Smart who had been active in the New York City loft scene in the 1970s.  There are a few excellent quintet sessions in the catalog from this period including First Zeit (1995), the first performance ever by anyone in the new music series at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge MA which would be a regular Leap of Faith venue for years.  After a few years, Mark relocated to New Orleans, and the core Leap of Faith became PEK, Glynis and Craig Schildhauer.  One of our most important Archival period performances was this trio with guest drummer Sydney Smart at the Autumn Uprising festival in Jamaica Plain, Unified Fields (1997).

In 1991 and 1992, I spent over a year preparing my first Frame Notation score for improvising orchestra entitled Expansions (performed 3 times at the amazing loft performance space, Mobius).  The score organized Events on a timeline including composed lines and other notational devices like what I learned from helping to prepare and interpret Masashi’s scores and what I learned from Mark McGrain at Berklee.  At the time, I thought this would lead to more similar works, but partially due to the huge amount of effort involved, I focused for a long time on purely improvised works for smaller ensembles.

Another important band for me during the 90s was the jazz orchestra of Raqib Hassan.  This large band had several formulations but typically included Glynis, me and multiple drummers / percussionists including Sydney Smart and Yuri Zbitnov.  We played Raqib’s compositions and sometimes covered jazz standards or Sun Ra compositions.  There were several big concerts including one dedicated to Coltrane and one dedicated to Sun Ra.  Raqib’s compositions used sophisticated jazz ideas and are more “free jazz” than typical in my Evil Clown ensembles which are more “free improvisation” or “pure improvisation.”

In 1998, I predicted the decline of Tower Records, and sick of the low pay and rotten treatment of their employees, decided to return to college at the University of Massachusetts to study Computer Science.  I had been writing mathematics to make Fractals in a computer program called Fractint with a Berklee pal, Martha Ritchie, for album artwork and for computer generated video at shows.  I knew that I enjoyed that this mathematical programming and that I could complete the computer science degree and radically improve the quality of my day gig.  Martha is a gifted pianist, we hung out a lot for several years and did record a few albums together (with animated fractals on the video versions) released with the band names Free Trance Ensemble and Fractal Trance Ensemble.

Leap of Faith had several multi-media partners for a few years in the mid-90s including dancer Adrienne T Hawkins and action painter Guadulesa.  Several performances included one or both of these artists culminating in a week with both at Mobius in 1997 with the PEK, Glynis and Mark McGrain Leap of Faith trio.  The second set of each of the 3 shows included a videographic score of animated Fractals prepared by me and Martha.  The video had slow movement and fast, agitated movement and provided a lot of information on energy level for the musicians to follow.  The discs are titled Mobius May 97, Vol. 1, Vol. 2 and Vol. 3.  YouTube Videos of the videographic score are here:  5/23/1997 & 5/24/1997.

I left Tower Records and got a non-technical job at the company that I still work for, a Consulting Engineering Firm called Simpson Gumpertz & Heger.  As I completed my programming degree at night, this turned into a very good technical job.  I still run the computer graphics department and do graphics, programming and data management for Engineers who are Expert Witnesses in huge construction litigations.  I’ve worked on lawsuits regarding the Big Dig in Boston, the New York City Subway, the Washington Monument, the damage to subway tunnels under the river into Manhattan during hurricane Sandy and well over 100 others.

In 1999, Craig left the scene, and the core trio became me, Glynis, and drummer Yuri Zbitnov from Raqib’s bands.  In mid-2000, I reached out to George Garzone and proposed a concert at Killian Hall MIT with his trio, The Fringe, and this Leap of Faith trio with special guest James Coleman on Theremin.  We would each play a set and then play a third set with both bands combined at the end.  Leap of Faith worked tirelessly to prepare for this show for most of a year, doing many recording sessions at Yuri’s house in Jamaica Plain.  At one of these sets, the music at the very end of the piece resembled some crazy circus music.  On the original unedited recording, you can hear me after the end of the piece saying, “The Fucked-Up Circus Comes to Town.”

Of course, this became the title of the album and then I needed artwork for the cover.  My housemate, Raffi, is a trained painter and together we conceived of a digital painting for the cover which Raffi then executed:  A giant clown (Godzilla sized) stampeding through a circus, squishing people, while juggling an elephant, a circus wagon, and several other large circus objects.  This is the origin story for the name of the label, Evil Clown.  The clown’s name is Sparkles, the Giant Evil Clown, and while he is perceived as evil by bystanders, he is not really evil, merely indifferent to the fate of the tiny insignificant bug-sized people he tramples.  Sparkles symbolizes Chaos – Chaos Theory is a key component of the theoretical foundation of our music which will be discussed in much greater detail later in this article.  A latter painting (from 2015) by Raffi introduces Sunshine, a giant evil Bunny with huge sharp teeth, hanging out with Sparkles.  Sparkles and Sunshine show up together a few years later in a third painting, and Raffi is currently (2021) working on a fourth painting with Sparkles and his pal Lurky, who is lurking behind the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Anyway, I worked my ass off for the year prior to the MIT concert with the Fringe, not only preparing the band, but going to school at night and working at the demanding technical day job.  After the concert I was exhausted, and without really planning to in advance, I stopped scheduling new sessions and it gradually became clear that I was taking a break.  I realized that the SGH job was an amazing opportunity to develop a career that would allow normal adult activities like buying a house that do not come easily or at all from a performance career in Avant Garde music.  I often say that my approach to music is cerebral rather than emotional or visceral, and for a long time the technical demands of the job satisfied my need to exercise my brain and I did not miss music making.

So, the MIT concert (2001) concludes what I call the Evil Clown Archival period.  The Leap of Faith set from this concert was released as Hierarchies.  I did record the combined set also, but for contractual reasons of George’s, it has never been possible to release this recording to the public:  Too bad, since it is a stellar performance. 

The main band of the Archival period, of course, was Leap of Faith in three different core configurations.  The core units performed with many different guests and I recorded everything on DAT tape.  At the Zeitgeist Gallery shows we generally would play with a second band.  Each group would play a set and then both groups would play one together – we played with a lot of interesting Boston area improvisors in this way.  During that time, I did release about 10 Leap of Faith records on CD, but I recorded every LOF performance and lots of other projects also including:

  • Wind (duet with Sam Lobel) even
  • Sky Saw (A rock project with Yuri and Core Redonnett on electric zither from the Blue Man Group)
  • Mental Notes (an overnight radio program at the Tufts radio station with Craig Schildhauer and many others)
  • Equilibrium (with Charlie Kolhase, Matt Langer, Tatsuya Nakatani and James Coleman)

Part I – History of Evil Clown

Early PEK History | Archival Period | Contemporary Period

Pandemic Period | Looking Forward (from April 2021)

History of Evil Clown (Contemporary Period)

Even while I was inactive musically, I continued to hang out with Yuri, who came frequently to my house on Friday nights for movie night at my home theater.  Around 2012, Yuri asked me if I wanted to record and perform with Mission Creep, a rock band led by his pal Greg Grinnell.  Also in this band was saxophonist Steve Norton who had played on Expansions and on one of the Boston Improvisors’ Collective shows.  Mission Creep has never played that often, but occasionally Greg would arrange a show and we would rehearse and then perform. 

Doing these occasional performances made me realize how much I missed playing music.  For a long time, my SGH day job required 65 or 70 hours a week and sometimes more:  So much time that any kind of serious music activity was simply out of the question.  I preferred to lay out completely, then to pursue music half-assed, so I had not considered resuming musical activity prior to this.  While I still have occasional heavy demands on my time for SGH, it is not constant anymore and in Fall of 2014 I decided that I would start playing again.  For several months that fall, I sampled the DAT tapes from the Archival period and created a bunch of new CDs of Leap of Faith and the other ensembles. 

I had used Fractals, created with Martha Ritchey, for Album Covers and Posters during the Archival period.  In the intervening time, computers had become far more powerful and there was a new Fractal Program called UltraFractal which is much better than Fractint.  I got the new program and created a generation of fresh Fractal images, writing a lot of Fractal generating math in the process.  My SGH gig had given me strong skills with Adobe Photoshop, so I made artsy digital alterations to the raw Fractal images for the new artwork.  While the images are different from each other in many ways, they also have some strong similarities which made them excellent for a marketing brand (together with Sparkles) to give all the products of the various ensembles a visual theme tying them together.  Occasionally, I spend a few days or a week adding to a huge library of Fractal Art images.  Whenever I put out a new album, I just need to pick source images from the library, and I can design packaging.  Fractals are Mathematical images of Chaos Theory with the property of self-similarity across scales:  To me they symbolize mathematical chaos and abstraction just like Sparkles does and tie-in to the music Theory discussed in detail below.

In early 2014, while in NYC on SGH business, I visited Downtown Music Gallery and had a long conversation with proprietor Bruce Lee Gallanter.  DMG specializes in the wacky music I listen to and I had been for years a weekly customer of the DMG list published at the end of each week.  Bruce knew me well as a customer, but not at all as a player.  After we discussed my music at length, I sent him a batch of the CDs from the Archival period.  He wrote great reviews of every disc I sent and was able to sell nearly all of it, persuading me that there would be interest in newly performed music.  Recently, for the 30-year anniversary of Downtown Music Gallery, an excerpt of the Leap of Faith Orchestra – The Photon Epoch was included in an hour-long YouTube program called DMG 30th Anniversary – Episode 01.  It is quite an honor for me to be included in this program with many well-known and less well-known accomplished improvisors. 

In January of 2015, Leap of Faith started up again with a core quartet of me, Glynis, Yuri, and Steve Norton.  This is the start of what I call the Contemporary Period.  Now having financial resources from my SGH gig not available in the Archival period, I immediately started to acquire many new horns and percussion instruments to broaden my palette of sounds and the palette available to the Evil Clown ensembles.  Six years later, I now have all the common and some uncommon orchestral woodwinds (6 saxophones, 7 clarinets, 4 flutes, 6 double reeds) and many other unusual wind instruments.  I also extended my acquisitions to include electronic instruments, string instruments and other sound-making devices.  The collection of instruments is called the Evil Clown Arsenal and the collection of all the involved performers is called the Evil Clown Roster.  While I alone play the horns, the other instruments are open for other players from the Roster who want to double, enabling great transformation of Sonority over the length of a single performance.  One feature of the Arsenal is large numbers of similar wood and metal percussion instruments like orchestral castanets and Tibetan Bowls and Bells.  For example, there are about 75 Tibetan Bowls (from a few inches to 15 inches across), enabling a large group of players to collectively create a very complex texture built from instruments from a tight Timbre Set.

I decided I wanted to also have a Leap of Faith Orchestra which would perform new Frame Notation Scores based on the ideas of Expansions (1992).  I had in mind a large improvising orchestra comprised of a horn section, a string section, a percussion section, guitars, piano, and electronics (up to 25 players).  Unlike Expansions, the scores are designed to be performed without the need for rehearsal:  Simple symbols and written English language descriptions are arranged on a timeline and the band executes the directions with the aid of a large sports clock. 

To prepare the musicians to improvise in an orchestra of 20 to 25 players, I decided to form several smaller ensembles that would record and perform together.  These bands were String Theory (Glynis, me and string players), Turbulence (me and other horn players) and Metal Chaos Ensemble (originally me and Yuri with other percussion players).  The ideas which guide the Frame Notation Scores are discussed in detail below in the second part of this essay.

I started having concerts at the LilyPad in Cambridge, which is a nice small venue, but expensive.  Eventually, I switched over to Outpost 186, around the corner:  Less nice and with no bar, but very cheap by comparison.  At Outpost 186, I had the third Saturday of the month from 2016 to the onset of the pandemic in 2020, and these bands and a few others alternated as the performer at those shows.  For the first year, we did small ensemble sets from these bands and 6 shows to prepare the Leap of Faith Orchestra at Clarendon Church in Somerville where we could do larger ensembles.  The last of the Clarendon Church shows was the first Frame Notation Score performed by The Leap of Faith Orchestra entitled The Expanding Universe.

So, during the Contemporary Period, many different Evil Clown projects run at once, each with a different planned general focus and Sonority.  I gradually set up a sophisticated studio called Evil Clown Headquarters at my house in Waltham.  Over time many more instruments have been added to the Arsenal, the recording equipment has greatly improved, and I have set up a LIVESTREAMING to YouTube rig with 8 cameras, real-time video mixing and high-quality sound. 

The Evil Clown catalog is wide and deep:  According to my master spreadsheet, the total release count as of April 2021 is 312.  I just finished updating the Evil Clown Catalog document which lists the track lists, dates, names and instrumentation for every Evil Clown release.  The Evil Clown website includes all the reviews we have received by Bruce Lee Gallanter (over 100) and Darren Bergstein for Downtown Music Gallery, and by others for All About Jazz, The Squid’s Ear, Free Jazz Blog, Jazz Right Now, etc.  On my YouTube page, are videos for many of the Archival Period performances and nearly all the Contemporary Period performances.  If you subscribe to the YouTube Channel you will get notifications at the beginning of performance broadcasts.

Following is a brief discussion of the arc of each of the units active in the contemporary period.

  • Leap of Faith (99 releases):  For the first year or so after the 2015 reboot, the core unit is quartet with me, Glynis, Yuri, and Steve.  Then Steve moved to Maine to go to graduate school, and we continued with the core trio.  Nearly all performances of Leap of Faith have guests from the Evil Clown Roster, and quintets or sextets are far more common than performances limited to the core unit.  At the end of 2019, Yuri decided to withdraw his participation in Evil Clown except for Metal Chaos Ensemble, and so now the core unit is duet.  Leap of Faith is, and always has been, my band with Glynis to leverage our deep interactions dating back now 30 years.  The various core units and the dozens of guest performers have served to give us different settings to explore our musical relationship, to make the performances different from each other, and to bring players from the LOFO and other units into our improvisation concept.
  • Leap of Faith Orchestra (35 releases):  Following the warmup work at the Sommerville Church leading up to the first contemporary period Frame Notation Score, The Expanding Universe, I found a nice larger venue called Third Life Studios in a different area of Sommerville where I scheduled 5 shows a year (two months apart excluding the one show in the middle of winter when hauling a lot of equipment is too difficult).  We performed 13 times at this venue between 2017 and 2019 when Susan had to give up the space due to the radical increase in the rent required to renew her lease.  At the conclusion of this run, I offered a 25 CD box set of the complete performances which you can find on bandcamp:  The Complete Leap of Faith Orchestra and Sub-Units Performances at Third Life Studios 2017 to 2019.  These performances do not use scores but did provide practice at unplanned improvisations with the ensemble size from about 7 to 15.  Each show (except one) started with an hours’ worth of short 15- or 20-minute sets by small Sub-Units of the orchestra (usually trios or quartets).  Each time I filled my van to the roof with equipment from the Arsenal so the musicians could play these auxiliary instruments as doubles to their ordinary instrument(s) and improvise with each other in both small units and in the largest pure improvisation settings with no score.  The auxiliary instruments are assigned as doubles in the Frame Notation Scores and the players got to experiment with them in these performances which were preparation for the scored performances of which there have been 6 to date.  I need a venue with a big stage for these shows which is expensive and difficult to arrange.  I bring a significant portion of the Arsenal for these shows requiring a large U-Haul truck:
  1. The Expanding Universe (6/4/2016 – Nave Series, Clarendon Hill Presbyterian Church)
  • SuperClusters (12/1/2017 – Pickman Hall, Longy School of Music)

There is further detailed discussion of the theory and practice of the LOFO scored performances at the end of this essay.

  • Metal Chaos Ensemble (49 releases):  MCE, the most prolific Evil Clown Ensemble besides LOF, has always included Yuri and me with a ton of different guests.  The original intent was to have mostly percussion players with my horns to prepare the percussion section for the LOFO.  Over time, there have been widely varied sets including many that have included more rock elements than present in other Evil Clown ensembles.  Great early albums included a trio with vibraphonist Andrea Nicodemou (Intermetallic Compounds), a trio with Bill T Miller on crazy gadgets and electronics (Chrononauts), a sextet with a guest black metal drummer and guitars (Corrosion), and a trio with guitarist Catherine Capozzi (War Tuba).  Over time, we did many more sessions with these players and others.  In 2018, Mission Creep played a bar gig where the one of the other bands included analog synthesis wiz Eric Woods.  I recruited Eric for MCE and the LOFO and we started to deliberately introduce more rock elements.  Yuri enjoys playing groove music and we looked for ways to bring in more rock elements including electric bass.  Cecil Taylor alumni Albey OnBass joined us that fall on electric upright bass for Syncretic Discipline, Beyond the Holy Mountain and several others.  We had been invited to do a show at a nice theater in Delaware and we planned to do a power trio edition with Albey, but he moved to New Orleans after we booked it, so we needed to find another bass player.  We found Mike Gruen for the gig (Basalisk), who is an excellent electric bassist, and was looking to stretch out from the song-oriented playing that he does most of the time.  The next four MCE sets (Fall 2019 to March 2020) are either quintet or sextet sets with the same band:  PEK & Mike Caglianone (reeds, percussion), Bob Moores (space trumpet, guitar, electronics), Eric Woods (analog synth), Mike Gruen (electric bass), Yuri Zbitnov (drums, percussion) and Joel Simches (recording, real time signal processing).  These albums each feature spoken words sections with the text derived from literature or movies, hard groove sections, spacey electronics sections, percussion sections, and freak out sections:  All improvised apart from the words of the selected text.  Those 4 albums are Proteus IV, The Nameless City, Call of Cthulhu, and The Riddle of Steel.  This free rock formula is very satisfying for the performers and has been well received by our audience and critics who review our work.  Once the pandemic set in, Yuri and I did a few duets including Don Quixote which includes studio overdubbing mimicking the real-time interactions of the sextet format.  We also did a great power trio edition set with Mike Gruen (Atomic Tuna) just before the third wave of the virus forced me to shut down ECH altogether until now.
  • String Theory (13 releases):  During the Archival period Leap of Faith recorded Linear Combinations and Transformations at Killian Hall, MIT.  The middle of three movements of this CD length work was a septet comprised of me and Mark McGrain on horns, a String Quartet (Glynis – vc, Craig Schildhauer – b, Rob Bethel – vc, and Forest Larsen – vla), and Lawrence Cook at the drum set.  In preparation for the septet movement, we did several sessions with just me and the strings.  String Theory is the contemporary period implementation of this idea.  I love playing with free improvisation string players, but they are hard to come by.  Orchestral string players are highly in demand and most of them are classically trained and not particularly interested in playing weird music.  Even so, we have had some great string players come and go and whenever the Evil Clown Roster has active string players, I scheduled sets for String Theory.  This band name will likely not produce more recordings since Yuri has left Leap of Faith – new performances in this category will be Leap of Faith sets.  A great String Theory set from 2016 featuring me, Glynis, violinist Mimi Rabson and cellist Jane Wang was released as Condensed Phases of Matter.
  • Turbulence (29 releases): Turbulence is the band that is mostly horn players, although there are relatively few releases that are horns alone.  The horn players often double multiple horns, percussion and/or electronics and sometimes we have a drummer.  There are 4 relatively early sets with the sub-group name Turbulence Doom Choir with me and Yuri with two tubas (Dave Harris and John Baylies) and electronics (one is Lava Flow).  There is a great performance (Upheaval) from 2019 with horn only quintet (PEK, Bob Moores, Michael Caglianone, Jim Warshauer and Ellwood Epps).  The most recent album, Friction Coefficients (2020), from just before the pandemic, features tenor saxophonist and flutist Bonnie Kane and her drummer John Loggia from Western Mass along with several Evil Clown regulars on horns. 
  • Mekaniks (5 releases) and Chixculub (3 releases):  These are other bands with more of a rock focus each featuring Yuri and me.  These projects occurred prior to the sextet free rock period of MCE and comprise our earlier work on introducing more rock elements.  Both units created good albums, but these groups were hard to schedule, and we did not continue them.  A good Mekaniks set to check out is The Great Klown Panik of 2016 and a good Chixculub set to check out is Impactor.
  • Axioms (1 release):  A one-off (Manifestations) featuring Albey OnBass and Jane Spokenword who were closely associated with Cecil Taylor’s final period.  Albey also performed on many Leap of Faith and Metal Chaos Ensemble Sets during the year he was in the area.  A very unusual item in the catalog since it features Jane’s spoken word poetry.  Shortly after this set Albey and Jane moved to New Orleans. 
  • Sub Unit #1 (2 releases):  The Orchestra shows at Third Life Studios were credited to Leap of Faith Orchestra and Sub-Units.  The short sets in the first half of the show were credited to Sub Unit #1, Sub Unit #2, etc…  So, the meaning of Sub Unit in the Evil Clown lexicon is a small ensemble composed of members of the Roster not assignable to one of the other ensemble names.  The two releases not from Third Life LOFO concerts with this band name are a duet with pianist Eric Zinman at Outpost 186 (Potential and Kinetic Energies) and a duet (Main Sequence) with percussionist Michael Knoblach at ECH.

Part I – History of Evil Clown

Early PEK History | Archival Period | Contemporary Period

Pandemic Period | Looking Forward (from April 2021)

History of Evil Clown (Pandemic Period)

Both me and my housemate Raffi are diabetic and therefore at elevated risk from Covid and we have been extraordinarily careful.  Apart from the few small ensemble MCE sets mentioned above and one Leap of Faith trio set, True Representations of Reality, with me, Glynis and Eric Zinman (piano, piano interior, synth, percussion) performed at Eric’s Studio 234, I kept Evil Clown Headquarters locked down and focused on producing solo work during the Pandemic. 

Every once in a while, there is a break in the crazy schedule, and I have some time to do a solo album. Our Grande Olde pal, the Corona Virus, has provided such a break in spades…. At the beginning of 2020, it appeared that the year would be our busiest yet… We did a bunch of albums in January, February and the first weeks of March, and then I was forced to cancel a bunch of wonderful performances scheduled for the months that followed. So, I caught up all my old business: web site, social media, distribution, and the other non-musical activity required to drive the enterprise. Then I took a month off… my biggest rest since I started up in 2015 after my long hiatus. In mid-May 2020 I started up again, conceiving new means of producing some of the enormous output normally achieved by Evil Clown.

Now in the second calendar year to be affected by the Stupid Virus, I really miss playing with others… For obvious reasons, I have been producing a lot more PEK Solo albums than I do typically.  Solo performance constrains the Sonority Set to resources that I alone use and to me alone as the performer.  As with larger ensemble Evil Clown sessions, the planning involves selecting sound resources from the massive Evil Clown Arsenal and setting up the studio with these instruments to allow rapid changes in instrumentation and therefore in Sonority.  I conceived of a formal system which provides a framework for creating solo works that are sufficiently different from each other that I can continue to produce new work at something close to my usual rate even while I can’t perform with others.

The PEK Solo albums fall into four categories:

  1. One continuous track (no overdubbing) of PEK playing one or many instruments with or without signal processing.
  • One continuous track of PEK playing one or many instruments with a prerecorded mix of samples drawn from the Evil Clown Catalog or specially recorded at Evil Clown Headquarters. Some of the recent batch use Looper electronics. Solo albums from before 2020 fall into the categories 1 & 2. 
  • A Quartet of PEKs – Four continuous tracks of one PEK each playing many instruments on each pass. Some of these use broad palettes and some use very focused palettes.
  • An Orchestra of PEKs – Many tracks of PEKs performing on a broad section of the Arsenal.

20 of the 32 total PEK Solo releases were recorded and released so far during the pandemic (January 2020 to May 2021) including two four-hour Category 4 (Orchestra of PEKs) compositions each in three 80-minute movements on 3 CD sets (Some Truths Are Known, Semantic Notions), a category 1 (PEK Solo) Requiem for my Father (Requiem for Raymond) performed within hours of learning of his passing in California last fall, and three category 3 (Quartet of PEKs) focused palette sets (Schematic Abstractions for the Clarinet Family, Fixed Intentions for the Saxophone Family, and Completeness for Flutes and Double Reeds).  Ironically, while my output slowed down a bit from usual, I spent more time playing than in a typical year due to the amount of overdubbing and studio construction.

As with all artists, my work naturally falls into periods as my story unfolds.  When a chapter concludes, there is an opportunity to collect that chapter’s work together in a big package.  Doing so helps to make clear the reasons for the grouping and to give the Evil Clown journey definition.  After the venue, Third Life Studios, in Cambridge was forced to close in 2020, the Leap of Faith Orchestra and Sub-Units project which occurred there concluded and I put together a 25 CD Box Set of the 13 performances:  The Complete Leap of Faith Orchestra & Sub-Units performances at Third Life Studios (2017 – 2019).  When the virus fired up, I similarly created a 26 CD box set of selected performances by Metal Chaos Ensemble:  Best of MCE 2015 to 2019.  Like these earlier Box Sets, the new 25 CD PEK Solo Box Set, Fundamental Units – Complete Solo Works from Jan 2020 to May 2021, collects performances by one ensemble belonging to a particular period:  PEK Solo projects during the Stupid Corona Virus.  Downloads and CDs of these giant box sets are half price compared to individual CD orders on my bandcamp sites.

I see the pandemic as a stupid interruption which we simply need to wait out.  People need to experience art and some people need to make art (myself included).  The audience for pure improvisation is small, but enthusiastic.  Improvisation performance is best experienced in person – the music is about the moment, so the audience being physically present in the same moment matters to their perceptions.  They can see the performance actions that result in the Sonority produced which helps many to process such abstract music.  

I don’t see a change in the role of music or art of any kind, just a limit on availability.  When the Virus is over, Live Performance will resume, and the interruption will be over.  One wrinkle for Evil Clown is that Outpost 186 in Cambridge where I have had a monthly residency for years may not survive, or at least not reopen soon.  While I search for reasonably priced performance space in the new world, performances will be streamed live to YouTube as often as I can schedule them from Evil Clown Headquarters.  YouTube LIVESTREAMS will resume mid-May, if you subscribe to the site, you will get notifications at the start of each performance.  An upcoming shows page on the Evil Clown Website and the Evil Clown Facebook Page contain calendars of pending performances.

Difficult music challenges public perceptions of “just what is music?”.  As with all art, the avantgarde pushes boundaries and broadens art for everyone.  This is the important role of progressive music.  Access has been interrupted, but the music continues, and its importance is unchanged.

History of Evil Clown (Looking Forward)

As I am writing this essay in April of 2021, having received my first vaccination shot and having the second one scheduled for next week with full vaccination to be achieved in mid-May, the CDC says that fully vaccinated adults can be together indoors with no masks.  Nearly all the players involved in the cancelled sets of April through June 2020 are still around and interested in resuming their involvement with Evil Clown.

I have emailed the Roster indicating that Evil Clown Headquarters (ECH) will be open to musicians who are fully vaccinated for LIVESTREAMING to YouTube performances starting after May 15.  As of today (4/24/21), I have 5 sessions in May and June on the book for Leap of Faith, Metal Chaos Ensemble, Turbulence, and the newly formed Expanse (with Michael Knoblach).  Yuri has decided to withdraw from Evil Clown altogether, and Steve Niemitz, a great drummer from western Mass, is going to commute into Boston for MCE sets to replace Yuri.  I’m planning a new ensemble called Simulacrum to feature mostly electronics.

I expect that the schedule will get full and stay full very quickly and we will probably average about 3 new releases per month in line with pre-pandemic times.  I also expect that the new work will come out strong right from the beginning since all of us are desperate to perform music with others and a key element in all great shows is the passion of the players for the moment of performance!!

On Transformation Focused Improvisation:

The History and Grand Aesthetic of the Evil Clown Record Label

Introduction| Part I: History of Evil Clown

Part II: Evil Clown’s Grand Aesthetic Problems and Solutions

Part III: Web Links to the Work of Evil Clown Ensembles

Part I – History of Evil Clown

Early PEK History | Archival Period | Contemporary Period

Pandemic Period | Looking Forward (from April 2021)