Elina Duni & Rob Luft

Produced in southern France in February 2020 and released in mid-November 2020, the album "Lost Ships" by Elina Duni caused quite a stir in the feuilleton. 12 songs on the themes of love and exile are interpreted here with chamber music delicacy: a concept album with clearly political undertones - home, migration, ecology are mostly melancholically staged here around moods and emotional states such as loneliness, being foreign, being abandoned, loss and longing. For singer and composer Elina Duni, "Lost Ships" opens a new chapter in her career. Born in Albania in 1981 into a family of artists, she moved to Switzerland after the collapse of the communist regime to receive classical piano training and discover her love of jazz. With a trio around the pianist Colin Vallon, Duni developed original, idiosyncratic, airy interpretations of Albanian folklore on several albums. But she wanted to be more than a singer in front of an accompanying band. The multilingual solo album "Partir" (2018) with an expansion and opening of the repertoire with her own compositions and a Jacques Brel cover was only logical. As intense as the soliloquies on "Partir" turned out to be, the subtle exchange with other musicians on stage seems more appropriate to the cause. On "Lost Ship", Albanian folklore remains a point of reference, but is rounded off by other traditionals and a whole series of original compositions. You could say: musical cosmopolitanism with a sense of origin and a curious hunger for experience.