Squidco Blurb

A special edition of the Turbulence wind ensemble, part of the Leap of Faith Orchestra, in a live to 2-track recording with live processing, extending the core group of wind & brass players David Peck, Michael Caglianone, Dennis Livingston, Bob Moores and Duane Reeds with trumpeter John Fugarino and drummer percussionist, who brought flute & sax player Bonnie Kane of WOO fame.

Squidco Staff

Liner Notes by PEK

I formed Turbulence in 2015 as I started to assemble players for the Leap of Faith Orchestra. Turbulence, the extended horn section for the Orchestra (along with guests on other instruments), also records and performs as an independent unit. As if this writing in 2021, we have recorded over 30 albums on Evil Clown with greatly varied ensembles.  All the smaller Evil Clown bands are really more about a general approach, rather than a specific set of musicians.  A session gets credited to Turbulence when it is mostly horn players and the only musician on all of them is me. The sessions range from an early duet with Steve Norton and me (Vortex Generation Mechanisms) to a 5-horn band with bass and two percussionists (Encryption Schemes) to four albums by the side project Turbulence Doom Choir which feature myself, multiple tubas, percussion, electronics, and signal processing and many other configurations.

Currently, the Evil Clown Roster has about 20 horn players.  When I schedule Turbulence sets, I put one on the weekend and one on a weeknight since some players can only do one or the other.  This is the second session of the second cycle of Turbulence sets since vaccines became available and I started having YouTube LiveStreaming sets at Evil Clown Headquarters.  Since so many players are available, I’m working on the problem of large ensemble improvisation with big groups of Evil Clown regulars mixed with some relative newbies…

This set was supposed to occur a couple of weeks back, but we had a movie night guest with a roommate who had symptoms that might have been Corona Virus, so it was postponed.  Originally, we were going to have 11 players including drums and Albey onBass, but in moving the date, we lost Albey to scheduling issues.  I was hoping to do this set with both bass and drums, but we still had John Loggia on the drum set, who did a fantastic job.  John came with saxophone/flutist Bonnie Kane from western Mass.  John and Bonnie had done a single excellent session (Friction Coefficients – 2/29/2020) right before the pandemic, and this set marks their return to Evil Clown for more.  Also joining Evil Clown for the first time is trumpeter John Fugarino.  I played with John in the early 90s in the Masashi Harada sextet along with Glynis Lomon, the cellist from Leap of Faith that I have played with since the early 90s in that band.  Recently I found John on Facebook and invited him to come down.  The rest of the ultimate octet is made up from recent Turbulence/Evil Clown regulars.

I’m super happy with this session.  The regulars and the newer arrivals really played extremely well together, listening intently and exercising admirable restraint.  8 players is a large band for pure improvisation; when an ensemble reaches 8 players in size or larger I refer to it as an improvisation orchestra, hence the name of this ensemble is Turbulence Orchestra.  Generally speaking, as ensemble size increases, so increases the difficulty of making music which is well-formed and tight.  I’m very interested in the aesthetic problems of larger group pure improvisations.  My Broad Palate concept is a solution to this problem which works by introducing many different possible sonorities.  Over the duration of the work, the combination of instruments undergoes tremendous variation, leading to a sequence of very different movements.  Most of the players on Wind Shear play several horns, and also auxiliary percussion and the other instruments which are strewn all throughout the studio.

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

PEK – 4/23/2022