Elina Duni

Elina Duni: A Time To Remember (ECM 2781)

| Tyran Grillo

Elina Duni
A Time To Remember

Elina Duni voice
Rob Luft guitar
Matthieu Michel flugelhorn
Fred Thomas piano, drums
Recorded July 2022 at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Cover photo: Nicolas Masson
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: June 16, 2023

And I will face the sea
that will bathe the pebbles.
Caresses of water, wind and air.
And light. Immensity.

So begins A Time To Remember, the latest box of newly minted coins to be placed alongside the others that singer Elina Duni has contributed to the ECM treasury. The song, “Évasion” (Escape), with music by Duni and guitarist Rob Luft and lyrics by Belgian-Israeli poet Esther Granek, is a paean to the stripping of hearts and minds down to their barest elements. Admirers of 2020’s Lost Ships will find the band more cohesive than ever, four hedges whose shapes have expanded and intertwined into one larger formation. Multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas contributes flowing pianism to the set’s opener, while Matthieu Michel adds a voice of his own through the flugelhorn, all of it cradling Duni’s journey from wave to wave, carrying eras of history compressed into every exhalation. On the next shore awaits “Hape Derën” (Open The Door), one of two Albanian traditionals on the program, the other being the enchanting “E Vogël” (Little One), in which Duni and Luft weave through the air as birds in flight. Thomas adds light drums and percussion to this scene of domestic comforts, while Duni’s voice is as delicate as rice paper, softening the glare of remembrance from beyond the pale. “Mora Testinë” (I Grabbed The Water Jar), a folksong from Kosovo, completes the ancestral triangle with whims of flirtation and potential romance, Luft’s guitar sailing crystalline waters, as Duni and Michel move forth in unison of theme and purpose.

Singer and guitarist are the primary creative forces behind the texts and composing, respectively. The title song is one of a quadriptych from their adoring collaboration. Recalling the great folkish ballads of the 1960s and 70s (I sense the fingerprints of Tim Buckley or even Dan Fogelberg), it finds collective purpose in its individualism, where the love one shares with another, soul to soul, stands as the only monument to a world where towers and altars and fallen into dust. Meanwhile, “Whispers Of Water” and  “Sunderland” offer dreamier energies, the latter nestled in more quotidian surroundings:

Cars and spaces
Concrete erases my state of mind
But somehow
The heart is on rewind

This is the core of their navigation, where a split between the flesh and the environments it inhabits functions as its own safety net. Even the wordless “Dawn” transpires as a meditation, the meaning of which is never in doubt.

A curated smattering of touchpoints rounds out the story arc. Charlie Haden’s “First Song” finds the musicians in the most fragile mode, letting the innocence of Abbey Lincoln’s heartfelt lyrics blossom without getting in the way of their fragrance. Even Luft’s fuzzy electric works beneath the voice rather than through it. The Stephen Sondheim classic “Send In The Clowns” stands out as a surreal addition. To hear something so mainstream takes us out of body. Like “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” in the opening of the Disney/Pixar film WALL-E, it’s almost as if the world for which it was created is gone. Instead, it exists on its own terms, haunting outer space with echoes of a planet left to die. “Mallëngjimi” (Nostalgia), with music/lyrics by Rashid Krasniqi, expresses a kindred longing for an Albania that no longer exists. Even the unison of flugelhorn and voice, expanded by pianistic harmonies, can only be a closed circle. The standard “I’ll Be Seeing You” is another step out of time. It’s as if the Great American Songbook were an unfinished sentence on the tip of the cosmic tongue. Accompanied only by acoustic guitar, Duni’s voice recedes, forever unrequited.

Just as light and shadow need each other to survive but never fully comingle, each song on A Time To Remember gives shape to the rest. Their unity is born in contrast, taking shape as one of my top ECM albums of the decade.

Elina Duni/Rob Luft: Lost Ships (ECM 2689)

| Tyran Grillo

Elina Duni
Rob Luft
Lost Ships

Elina Duni voice
Rob Luft guitar
Fred Thomas piano, drums
Matthieu Michel flugelhorn
Recorded February 2020
Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Cover photo: Jean-Paul Dumas-Grillet
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 13, 2020

You’ll have to flee,
But you’ll carry
This relentless sea,
Echoing in you, for always.

With this lyric, Elina Duni and Rob Luft share the secret of their collaborative masterpiece, Lost Ships. Between themes of migration and ecological failure, interspersed with memories of times and places, the Albanian-Swiss singer and British guitarist turn the spirit of contradiction inside out over and over until the differences blur beyond recognition. The track yielding this poetic observation, an ode to the wind entitled “Brighton,” is a veritable curtain of sound billowing in breath. Before that, however, the Italian lullaby “Bella Ci Dormi” (Beauty, You Sleep) elicits the album’s first declaration. Whereas we might normally think of such singing as marking the closing of a day, this feels more like the opening of one. The pianism of British multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas and lilting guitar exude the same grammar. Other traditional gems, including the Albanian “Kur Më Del Në Derë” (When You Appear At Your Doorstep) and the American “The Wayfaring Stranger,” remind us that nothing has truly changed from when they were first unearthed.

“Flying Kites” is one of the many journeys herein penned by Duni and Luft and stands out for its instrumental unraveling, especially in the playing of Swiss flugelhornist Matthieu Michel, who completes the ensemble. Further originals include “Numb,” a timely plea for forgiveness, and the title song, a shapely construction that travels in curves even as it speaks straight to the heart. Another is “Empty Street,” a duet that turns ghosts into signposts for those living in the wake of their demise…

No matter what Duni touches, she turns into something far more precious than gold: time incarnate. A marvelous example is her rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “I’m A Fool To Want You.” As a lantern hanging from the outstretched hand of a dark past, it seeks redemption in an era that has forgotten its meaning. At Duni’s lips, the words remind us of just how sharp the edges of hope can be. And in making Charles Aznavour’s “Hier Encore” her own, to the sole accompaniment of an acoustic guitar, she helps us understand that nature stands in the way of love when our love of self stands in the way of nature.

Lost Ships carves a special line in ECM’s broad waters, and to its fleet I would add Amina Alaoui’s Arco Iris, Arianna Savall/Petter Udland Johansen’s Hirundo Maris, and Norma Winstone’s Somewhere Called Home for worthy company. As such comparisons should imply, it is more than a recording; it is a voyage, contrary to its title, of being found.

Elina Duni: Partir (ECM 2587)

| Tyran Grillo

Partir

Elina Duni
Partir

Elina Duni voice, piano, guitar, percussion
Recorded July 2017, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineers: Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard (mastering)
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 27, 2018

We are all departing, bound to be torn away,
one day or another, from what we love.
Here are scenes of departure sung in nine languages.
All we are left with is the unknown ahead of us.

So does Elina Duni describe this intimate new collection of songs. As on her previous outings for ECM, if by different register in being alone, the Albanian singer grabs hold of her roots and squeezes them until tears of personal significance drip into the vessels of her guitar, piano, frame drum, and voice itself.

Domenico Modugno’s “Amara Terra Mia” (Bitter Land of Mine) opens as many doors as the song has words. It’s a film reduced to a single camera and actor, a memory that finds its protagonist severing the umbilical cord of her ancestral home in favor of itineracy. But while there’s as much to be gained as lost from this endeavor, the uncertainty of it all looms over her like a cloud of darkness, her only companion the guitar that gives her a ground upon which to place her vocal step.

On the surface of this and all songs to follow there is a fracture, from which issues a ribbon of nostalgic patterns and color schemes, but which in its unraveling signals an end to things. Such mortality is felt with deep urgency in Alain Oulman’s “Meu Amor” (My Love) and Duni’s own “Let Us Dive In.” In the latter, she holds the piano close to her chest, as if to transfer some of her heartbeat to its material assemblage in the hopes of illuminating something common to both. In the fleshly conflict of Muhammad Abd al Rahim al Masloub’s “Lamma Bada Yatathanna” (When He Was Swaying) and solace-seeking litany of Jacques Brel’s “Je Ne Sais Pas” (I Don’t Know), she dismantles façades of expectation to expose the shadows slumbering behind them. With these she dances in defiance of human contact.

The album’s most resonant chambers house its traditional selections, intersecting with cultural touch-points in Kosovo, Armenia, Macedonia, and Albania. From the separation anxieties of “Vishnja” (The Cherry Tree) and “Lusnak Gisher” (Moonlit Night), both of which share metaphorical affinity with Philip Laskowsky’s “Oyfn Veg” (On the Road), to the dolorous strains of “Vaj Si Kenka” (How) and fleet images of “Schönster Abestärn” (Beautiful Evening Star), Duni broadens her wingspan to ensure total protection when night falls. But few beats of those feathers are as powerful as those sung without accompaniment in “Kanga e Kurbetit” (The Exile Song). Therein, her illustration of exile is itself a form of exile, dividing the self into as many components as possible before putting them together anew, minus the broken pieces.

Elina Duni Quartet: Matanë Malit (ECM 2277)

| Tyran Grillo

Elina Duni Quartet
Matanë Malit

Elina Duni voice
Colin Vallon piano
Patrice Moret double bass
Norbert Pfammatter drums
Recorded February 2012, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineers: Gérard de Haro, Nicolas Baillard
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“This album is the echo of my childhood, my exile and my reconciliation with the two worlds that have shaped me—the Albania of my roots and the Switzerland of my life today.”

Matanë Malit. Beyond the mountain. The title of Elina Duni’s ECM debut. Yet something more. A call to the spirit in whose hands rests the diary her quartet inscribes with accounts of a tormented past. With one eye longing for her childhood in Albania, another taking in the classical, blues, and jazz traditions into which she has since grown, Duni treats every word that crosses her lips as if it were the first. By paying homage to the land of her birth, she forges a land in and of itself, each song a tectonic plate beneath the soil of the group’s atmospheric arrangements.

It was pianist Colin Vallon, with whom Duni studied at Berne’s Hochschule der Künste, who encouraged the developing singer to mine the past for inspiration. Her duo work with Vallon formed the seed of the current project, fleshed further by drummer Norbert Pfammatter and Vallon’s trio bassist, Patrice Moret.

In assembling this program, the quartet had to clean out the dust of political distortion that had gathered in its crevices, for many of the songs therein found themselves lyrically changed to suit the propaganda machine of a fervent communist regime. The titular shepherdesses of “Çobankat” long once more for self-sufficiency in the face of an inflexible marriage tradition, their voices wafting over the hills through Duni’s earthen diction with determination, beauty, and wit. Such individualism surely ruffled the feathers of agitprop pundits, who recast these once “progressive” women as “brave” allies bringing provisions and darning socks for anti-fascist partisans in the mountains. Such history further informs “Mine Peza,” a verse often sung by Duni’s maternal grandfather, who fought alongside those very partisans at the mere age of 12. Written under Mussolini’s shadow, it tells the tragic story of its eponymous hero, ending the album on its most solemn note:

Let’s cast off the chains
of this cruel occupation
cries the mother.
But the gun in the hand
of the treacherous soldier
shoots the mother dead.

Along the way, however, we do find moments of joy in a place where even the longest political arms cannot reach: the human heart. The secret love made manifest in “Ka një mot” (For a year) begins the album with youthful optimism, and is emblematic of the group’s democratic energy. Duni’s presence is close as a whisper, even as it seems to sing from a distance. Moret, Pfammatter, and lastly Vallon buffs every rock of this landscape until it speaks. There is also the invigoration of “U rrit vasha” (The girl has grown up), a wedding song from Kosovo that finds a living smile in every change of terrain.

The girl has grown up
in our mountains.
Her body is tall like a cypress
and the birds sing.

“Erë pranverore” (Spring breeze), a once-forbidden song from 1962, rises from the ashes here a beautiful organism. Every muted sentiment rejoices anew at the wonders of a life without borders. Vallon’s muted strings provide a percussive and melodic backbone as Duni follows roads to lovers in full bloom. True to the history being told, however, she looks also at the destitute. We stand with the “Vajzë e valëve” (Girl of the waves) as she yearns for her husband who may never return, invisible as he is among the waves of his vocation. Her love remains potent against the attacks of violent waters, but for how long?

Beautiful birds
my only hope lies in you.

And many of us will relate to the shattered protagonist of “Unë ty moj” (Me and you), whose love proclaims itself far too late, only to find the idol of its affections in the arms of another.

Burn my soul,
burn.

There are, too, the hero songs, which place emphasis on Albania’s vast diaspora. “Kjani trima” (Cry brave ones), for one, pits us against the mighty Ottoman Empire and searches futilely for those lost in the aftermath. Like the evocative “Ra kambana” (The bells are ringing), this is a song of the Alvanitas, Albanians living in northern Greece. “Çelo Mezani,” for another, tells of a local southern Albanian hero whose tragic death by bullets leaves a despondent mother behind. Heartrending even without knowledge of its content, the music embraces his fallen body and inters it with palpable care. Each note is a quiet cry, a reflection upon waters long disturbed but still as glass in memory.

Duni pens the most effective song of the set. Setting verse by the great Ismail Kadare, her “Kristal” fits seamlessly into the rest. A dance of death and forgetting, it lets us fall until we are at peace with what has transpired. “Poetry,” writes Duni in her liner notes, “is what guides and fascinates me,” and this is precisely what we feel coursing through the music even when she absents herself from it. Her silences and wordless flights lift us into a world preserved beyond not only the mountains but also the clouds, giving space for her band mates to expand upon what is painted before us. Their palette is the Albanian language itself, and by extension its heritages; their canvas, the mirror of ignorance that still surrounds this neglected republic. In paying due respect to the past, they have created an anthem for the future.

And when you remember the old house,
the friends we’ve lost
and those who are gone.
You will remember me too
like a stranger.
Like a statue whose arm you broke
in a wild embrace!

(To hear samples of Matanë Malit, click here. See this review in its original form at RootsWorld here.)