It's been a long time since Kurt Elling or for that matter Danilo Pérez have made an album as accomplished as Secrets are the Best Stories. (In Elling's case 2009's Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of Coltrane and Hartman; in the case of Pérez Across the Crystal Sea from a year earlier.)

Best and top vocals jazz album of 2020, supremely literary and poetic Elling has always had a faraway aura while Pérez cloaks the majesty of his playing in an often oblique magical realism that suits Elling's style. As a lyricist Elling does not go in for gimmicks, his method more a crafting of the metaphysical that will slowly invite you in to discover more as the many layers of the songs reveal themselves.

The album's cast of players includes Clark Sommers on double bass on a piece inspired by a Franz Wright poem shaped around a Jaco Pastorius piece, while alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón (more significantly), drummer Johnathan Blake and guitarist Chico Pinheiro also figure. But overwhelmingly the main musical direction is from piano leading to a conversation with voice. The ''Panamonkian'' style that Pérez himself has used as a shortcut in the past to describe his approach is more expansive than ever, his solo on 'Gratitude (for Robert Bly)' worth the price of the album alone. A great achievement, almost operatic at its most intense on 'Beloved (for Toni Morrison)' that every jazz fan should find the time to listen to and absorb.

marlbank albums of the year will be published on Thursday 31 December round midnight