Mek Do & Mend — Wonky Logic (2026)
Fifteen years of writing, one day of playing
By Rafi Mercer
There's a phrase my generation inherited without ever really needing it. Make do and mend. It began as a wartime government pamphlet in 1943, teaching a rationed country to darn, patch and reuse. By the time it reached the rest of us it had stopped being advice and become a way of describing certain households. The ones where nothing was thrown away. Where things were made to last longer than they were built for.
Say it in Leeds and it shortens.
Mek do.
Dwayne Kilvington got his title from his mother. He grew up on a council estate in Leeds, down the road from where I'm writing this, making music on whatever the house could offer. A second-hand keyboard. A desk that wasn't quite a desk. Equipment kept alive well past its natural life. That resourcefulness is the album's first instrument. You can't hear it, exactly. You can hear what it made.
For twenty years he has been the musician other musicians call. He was the bass player and a founding member of Steam Down, the south London collective that helped define a generation of British jazz. He has played and recorded alongside Nala Sinephro, Yussef Dayes, Shabaka Hutchings, Emma-Jean Thackray and Nightmares On Wax. He has been musical director for other people's records. He's been the quiet centre of rooms where the name on the poster belonged to someone else.
Mek Do & Mend is his own, released by Brownswood. Fourteen tracks.
The way it's built is unusual. The music spans more than fifteen years of writing. The opener, "Strange Attractor", is a piece he wrote at seventeen, named after the mathematical idea that systems which look chaotic are often circling a hidden shape, a pattern you can only see from far enough away. Beside it sit pieces written months before the session. Childhood and adulthood share a running order, without apology.
Between them, voices. These are not interludes in the usual sense. They are voice notes from the people who made him. An aunt remembering him playing in church as a boy. Friends who were there for the first beats. Teachers, collaborators, mentors. His mother, describing her son in her own words. He tells his story by letting other people tell theirs. The music is the autobiography. The voices are the biography.
The musicians were chosen the same way. These are not session players but people from the life itself. Luke Wynter, from the Leeds College of Music years. Benji Appiah, Steam Down's drummer. His partner, Vanessa Rani. Brother Portrait on "A Thousand Hands". Nubiya Imani. The final track is called "Made By Many". By the time you reach it, the title needs no explaining.
Then the session itself. One day. Studio One at RAK in St John's Wood, the whole thing played live. It was mixed by Rick David through an analogue Cadac desk and mastered by Stuart Hawkes at Metropolis. On paper that reads like a record chasing a vintage sound. By its own account it isn't. The stated aim was neither nostalgia nor hi-fi perfection, but a record you could return to across a lifetime and keep finding new things in.
Most records are a snapshot.
This one is a long exposure.
That's its essential quality. A life's worth of material, compressed into the hours a band can hold its nerve in a live room. And there is conviction in it as well as memory. "B.A.M.E (Beyond All Marginalised Expectations)" takes an acronym long imposed on racialised communities in Britain and turns it round, from a box someone else draws into a statement of what's possible.
Kilvington is wary of the label that will follow the record around. He doesn't want it reduced to jazz. In his words, it's "more like a novel about life told through music." He's right to resist, and the jazz is in there all the same. It's in the Leeds College training, the church, the beat-making with friends, the twenty years of standing beside the best players of his generation. This is what new music made by someone who has studied the old actually looks like. Not a reference. An inheritance, carried and mended and played forward.
Which is why it belongs in a listening room. Not because it is quiet, because it isn't. It moves between full jazz arrangements, broken rhythms, piano, synths and brass. It belongs there because it depends on order. The voices only make sense in sequence. Shuffle it and you lose the people. Take a track out on its own and you lose the person speaking before it. It asks to be heard the way records are heard at the Listening Club: side one, then side two, nobody talking, nothing skipped.
Its afterlife began before it existed. Gilles Peterson committed to putting it out before he'd heard a note. That's a rare kind of reception. Not a review. Trust. The record arrives digitally on 11 November, with the vinyl following a couple of days later, and what happens next belongs to the people who sit with it.
Mending is the half of the phrase people forget. Making do is endurance. Mending is care. It means taking something that was never meant to hold and making it hold anyway.
A second-hand keyboard.
A mother's phrase.
A room full of the people who were there all along.
Mek do. Mend.
Quick Questions
When is Mek Do & Mend released?
The album is out digitally on 11 November 2026 via Brownswood Recordings, with the black vinyl LP (BWOOD456LP) following on 13 November.
Who is Wonky Logic?
Wonky Logic is Leeds-born, London-based composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Dwayne Kilvington. He was a founding member of Steam Down and has worked with Nala Sinephro, Yussef Dayes, Shabaka Hutchings, Emma-Jean Thackray and Nightmares On Wax.
Why listen to an album start to finish?
Some records are built as sequences rather than collections of songs, and they lose meaning when they're shuffled. Listening in order, without interruption, lets the shape of the whole record arrive. That's the idea behind listening bars and the Tracks & Tales Listening Club.
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