"Yet More Brilliant Music" - Giles Peterson

This is the band’s first release since the loss of ATA guitarist Chris Earl Dawkins in early 2025, and the album carries that weight with honesty and grace. Across four expansive, long-form pieces, A Portal to Here reflects a shared journey through grief, resilience, and renewal. It’s both a tribute to Chris’s creativity and a powerful reminder of music’s ability to hold, heal, and connect.

Featuring WMD stalwarts Tony Burkill, Neil Innes, Sam Hobbs, and Sam Bell, the album introduces Sorcerers keyboardist Johnny Richards to the WMD sound. Richards brings a fresh new take to the piano role here, drawing on what is clearly a broad knowledge of jazz history and channelling that through his own unique 21st century musical perspective.

The album also features contributions from Alice Roberts on harp, bringing the spirit of Alice Coltrane, Ben Powling on baritone saxophone, Richard Ormrod on woodwind, and Kev Holbrough & Steve Parry on brass. Those Sun Ra-esque horn sections lift the mood whenever they appear.

Lead tracks Dance of the Spirits are rooted with a strong core of Baptism and The Blues and sublime playing by Richards and Brother Earl, which begins with Tony on flute, over rhythms that are directly reminiscent of open-hearted late-60s spirituality. Tony later moves to tenor and, (as on all four tracks here) eventually builds to the peaks of shattering emotional intensity that fans of Work Money Death - and spiritual jazz in general - love.