Fresh from bagging his second Grammy in March earlier this year for his brilliant debut on Edition Records, Secrets Are The Best Stories, Kurt Elling’s follow-up for the label sees him taking a funky new direction in the company of guitarist and co-producer Charlier Hunter – 20 years after Elling guested on Hunter’s 2001 Blue Note album Songs From the Analog Playground – plus two members of long-standing groove merchants Butcher Brown, keys player DJ Harrison and drummer Corey Fonville. The album’s opening salvo and title track establishes the head-nodding, marmoreal sound-world, with Elling penning smart new lyrics to the classic 1978 Freddie Hubbard cut, and band and singer springing a dramatic switch to half time at just over the two-thirds point. ‘Sassy’ presents a hip reworking of Manhattan Transfer’s tribute to Sarah Vaughan, while the inspiriting band collaboration ‘Manic Panic Epiphanic’ sees Elling flexing his falsetto to maximum effect. Elling clearly relishes delivering the vivid imagery of the Tom Waits/Kathleen Brennan-penned spoken word, ‘Circus’ (“Topping the bill was Horse Face Ethel And her Marvellous Pigs In Satin”) and fruitfully dips into his back catalogue by revisiting ‘Endless Lawns’ from his 2018 album The Questions, in which he appends new lyrics to Carla Bley’s incomparably beautiful ‘Lawns’ – interesting to note that here Elling chooses to interweave the Judith Minty poem ‘Sailing By Stars’, rather than Sara Teasdale’s ‘Winter Stars’ as he did on The Questions. The contemplative stasis of ‘Where To Find It’, in which Elling adds new lyrics to ‘Aung San Suu Kyi’, a composition by one of his most important touchstones, Wayne Shorter, is yet another standout.