“Recording Stories has been a unique and very fulfilling experience,” explains guitarist Roni Ben-Hur, “allowing me to incorporate songs I loved since my childhood, and ones that speak to social issues that are important to me, with the exquisite mastery of the artists in this album.” There's quite a collection of stories here then, of many different moods and flavours, and Ben-Hur has assembled an appropriately talented set of musical expatiators to help him shape the narrative arc of each piece.

There are songs of love, such as ‘But I Had to Say Goodbye’, with lovely, yearning interplay between Ben-Hur, pianist George Cables, bassist Harvie S and drummer Victor Lewis, and the opener, ‘La Serena’, a Sephardic folk song with vocals by Magos Herrera. There are songs of hope and resistance in the midst of great darkness and overwhelming political circumstances: the gentle ‘Ha'omnam’, with lyrics by the Hebrew-language poet Leah Goldberg sung by Tamuz Nissim, and ‘A Redoblar’, sung by Herrera and featuring some terrific uplifting solo work from trumpeter Ingrid Jensen. The album closer, Cables's composition ‘Melodious Funk’, is, as you might have guessed from the title, a homage to Thelonious Monk and brings proceedings to a winningly exuberant conclusion.