For its lyrical depth, emotional sincerity, and stellar performances, Secrets Are The Best Stories must be considered one of the most compelling entries in Kurt Elling’s acclaimed discography. Elling partners here for the first time with Panamanian pianist Danilo Pérez, and the sense of a shared aesthetic sensibility is keenly felt throughout. Based on the classic Jaco Pastorius composition, ‘Continuum’, ‘A Certain Continuum’ returns us to the 2018 Rilke-inspired collaboration with Branford Marsalis, The Questions. Indeed, Elling’s lyrics give a conscious nod to the themes of the earlier album (“Questions linger on until the end”). Based on a theme by Pérez’s long-time mentor and bandleader, Wayne Shorter, in ‘Stays’ Elling discovers why the elderly neighbour in his apartment block avoids him, in a chilling note from history (“How to endure, when fear and hate is such a lure, at history’s core. The answer’s obscure.”), with the deep sense of unease heightened by Pérez’s use of bitonality. The album’s Pérez/Elling-penned centrepiece ‘Beloved (for Toni Morrison)’ is a tour de force, representing the heart of the album in both a structural and dramatic sense, and featuring an especially powerful contribution from altoist Miguel Zenón. Another Pérez/Elling co-write, the tintinnabulating ‘Songs of the Rio Grande’, introduces the beguiling timbres of a prepared piano. Elling also writes new lyrics for Vince Mendoza’s ‘Esperanto’, and offers big-hearted takes on works by Silvio Rodríguez (the deeply captivating ‘Rabo de Nube’) plus Django Bates/Sidsel Endresen (‘Stages I, II and III’ from Endresen’s 1994 ECM album, Exiles). The Pérez vignette ‘Epilogo’ brings this unerringly fine album to a hushed close.