Album of the Week, July 20, 2024
Kurt Elling was stretching out. The jazz singer had started his career with a bang, signing with Blue Note in the early 1990s and recording a string of Grammy nominated albums (winning for 2009’s Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman) that were informed by a unique combination of dramatic sense, beat poetry, and vocalese — taking compositions without words and scatting or even writing new lyrics for them. This formula worked across six albums for Blue Note and five for Concord Records from 1995 to 2015.
But by the end of that period the singer was starting to show signs of restlessness. He parted ways with pianist and arranger Laurence Hobgood, who had been with him from the first Blue Note album. He collaborated with saxophonist Branford Marsalis and his quartet, recording the album The Upward Spiral, and with pianist Brad Mehldau, appearing on his album Finding Gabriel. And he changed labels again, to UK independent Edition Records. Secrets are the Best Stories, recorded with pianist Danilo Pérez (known for his long collaboration with Wayne Shorter), alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon, bassist Clark Sommers, drummer Johnathan Blake, guitarist Chico Pinheiro, and percussionists Rogerio Boccato and Román Diaz.
Secrets are the Best Stories opens with the first three songs written over existing jazz tunes by Jaco Pastorius and Wayne Shorter. “The Fanfold Hawk” is dedicated to poet Franz Wright, and Elling adapts parts of Wright’s poem “The Hawk” for the lyric, imaging abandoning the “crazed, incessant sounds” that drive us toward, as the poet writes, “what makes me sick, and not/what makes me glad.” The song is performed with minimal accompaniment by Sommers, with Elling navigating the thorny vocal line above Sommers’ countermelody. The poem transitions seamlessly into “A Certain Continuum,” also based on a Pastorius melody, his “Continuum” from his first album. Elling’s lyrics capture the mystery of the ever changing world as well as the mysteries of life. The fuller band arrangement here gives us the first of Danilo Pérez’s improvisational moments in a brilliant solo.
“Stays” is a full-on story, set to Wayne Shorter’s “Go” from his seminal 1960s album Schizophrenia. Elling sets the story of a mysterious upstairs neighbor with a secret past to Shorter’s twisting saxophone line, but Pérez’s arrangement strips back the chordal complexity of Shorter’s original sextet to the bare minimum of the piano trio. “Go,” as I wrote in 2022, is a subtle melody that “sneaks under the blankets of your mind”; here the melody is put to good service in delivering the story of a man haunted by ghosts.
“Gratitude (for Robert Bly)” adapts and continues the story in the poet’s “Visiting Sand Island,” shaping a tale of a man who thinks himself unlucky despite his poetic gifts. Pérez and Sommers exchange salsa patterns above a gentle 6/8 sussuration from the drums and percussionists. This leads into “Stage I,” composed by Django Bates with lyrics by Sidsel Endresen from the latter’s 1994 ECM album Exiles. The song creates a sense of disassociation and exploration of self around a series of similes: “Like being in a story/like starring in a play/acting out some destiny/far, far away from anywhere… Like watching people watching you/Like hanging out in No Town/Like you knew the lingo/ Like flying kites from a basement window.” It’s deeply moving in a tentative, delicate sort of way.
This leads into “Beloved (For Toni Morrison).” Elling tells a story of the inhumanity of the chattel slavery system in the pre-Civil War American South. Drawing on an 1857 poem by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” he illustrates the dilemma of slavery with the story of a mother who fails to protect all her children as they try to escape their captors. While marginally more hopeful than his source material (in the original poem, the mother kills her own children rather than let them be returned to slavery), it’s still a dark tale with no happy endings, albeit beautifully sung. The concluding movements, “Stages II, III,” of the Bates and Endresen poem frame the tale with a ghostly story of a narrator who has disappeared from her own life.
“Song of the Rio Grande (for Oscar and Valeria Martinez-Ramirez)” is a companion to “Beloved,” telling the story of the 2019 drowning death of Oscar Ramirez and his daughter Valeria as they sought to cross the Rio Grande after despairing of legally immigrating to the United States. It’s a mournful song, but coldly precise after the churning emotion of “Beloved.” He follows this with Silvio Rodriguez’s “Rabo de Nube”; sung in the original Spanish, he wishes for a whirlwind to sweep everything away, to remove the sadness and provide revenge.
“Esperanto” switches gears back to the power of hope. Singing over a Vince Mendoza melody, Elling calls out the power of letting one’s own actions and existence be sufficient to protect against the horrors of the world: “It’s a hope / a sign / a measure of quiet rapture / of love and what might come after
It’s letting go / and letting no answer be an answer.” The album closes with Pérez’s quiet “Epilogo,” which ends on a unresolved suspension as if to say: who can tell how things will end?
Secrets are the Best Stories is that rare jazz vocal album, an easy surface listen that reveals deeper layers the more you listen. Little wonder it won a Grammy for best jazz vocal album in 2021; Elling’s deep heart and challenging social vision, along with his mind-boggling ability to invest impossible melodies with ease and grace, created something deeply powerful here. He would change gears again with his next album, a collaboration that took him in a very different direction; we’ll hear that next time.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
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