TIRANA, Sept. 10 – Switzerland-based jazz singer Elina Duni has chosen Tirana as her first stop as part of her Balkan tour promoting her latest Dallendyshe (Swallow) album, a mix of jazz and folk music.
Elina Duni will give two concerts in Tirana on Sept. 14 and 15 at the concerts hall of the Orthodox Cathedral in Tirana before travelling to promote her album in Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia.
“Each of the 12 tracks has the unmistakable yearning sound of Eastern Europe with some hints of Arabic tones and yet the jazz influence is well-present, tastefully heard from piano, bass and ever so subtle drumming. The songs are about loss and exile but, as stated in the notes supplied, the pain is sung or danced away, rather like the feel of blues music, sadness with attitude,” says a review by the British studio where Duni recorded her album.
Born in Tirana, Albania, in 1981, in an artist family, Elina Duni made her first steps on stage as a singer at the age of five and sang for the National Radio and Television. In 1991, after the fall of the communist regime, she arrived in Switzerland and settled in Geneva together with her mother where she started the classical piano and discovers jazz. Some musical, film and theater projects preceded before she studied singing and composition at the Hochschule der Kunste Bern in the jazz department. During this period, she developed the Elina Duni Quartet with Colin Vallon on piano, Patrice Moret on double bass and Norbert Pfammatter on drums – which represents a return to her musical sources, a combination of Balkan folk songs and jazz.
After two albums, the “Baresha” (2008) and “Lume Lume” (2010), the quartet released in September 2012 its debut “Matanà« Malit” (Beyond the Mountain), a musical homage to Albania. “Over the last several years, Elina Duni Quartet has bloomed into a subtle unit of broad artistic reach. They make the integration of modal jazz and folk music sound organic. And, reinforcing Duni’s stark delivery, the players seem to get inside the texts,” says ECM producer Steve Lake.
