In A Mellow Tone
Wednesday September 17th, 2025 with Heavy Ben
Work Money Death, The Lewis Express

If you're like me and your jam is 1960s and 70s spiritual jazz recordings from Impulse!, Strata East and private press labels, you need to check out Work Money Death. It's not just their sound that evokes the deep transcendent music of Pharaoh Sanders and Alice Coltrane, it's the spontaneity of the recording process. Many of their tracks are recorded in one take without rehearsing. "The players may have known where they were starting off, however from there, none of them were sure where they would end. The results are pure brilliance, spiritual jazz at its absolute best featuring soaring solos, meditative soulful grooves, layered horns, dynamic percussion, hand claps, spoken word and even a choir." Work Money Death is the group that initially backed sax player Tony Burkill on his 2017 debut record of the same name. A stalwart of the Leeds (UK) music scene for the better part of three decades, Burkill got a late start on his recording career and WMD now has five releases in seven years. A further recording credit for Burkill is with The Sorcerers, purveyors of psychedelic Ethio-jazz funk. At the core of The Sorcerers is Neil Innes: bass player, recording engineer and label boss at ATA (All Things Analogue). Neil Innes doesn't have much spare time as he plays with Work Money Death, The Sorcerers, and the second band we are profiling tonight, the Lewis Express. Their inspiration goes further back to 1960s soul-jazz and the great pianists Ramsey Lewis, Les McCann, and Horace Silver. As with many of those classics, these were recorded live off the floor, capturing the rich interrelationship between the players and leaving some of that chunky room noise, lending the albums a sound that's "as thick as a steak and raw as a carrot". Innes says, "Today's technology with the ability to endlessly edit, tweak, cut and paste has removed those honest human moments from the table. Is there the same intense commitment to a recording if you knew that you can just fix it after? And where do you draw the line of what you fix? Modern production has become like Photoshop for the music industry. I prefer Polaroids." https://atarecords.bandcamp.com/ (to embiggen the show icon, right-click and choose "Open image in new tab")