Elina Duni

Artist Website
“Traditional music is modal, and often the jazz I play is also modal, which means that I improvise according to a mode, a scale, or in other words, a melody … I think of music as a horizontal and also as a colour … The place where these two worlds come together. Making music in general is a story of encounters.”    
- Elina Duni
 
Swiss-Albanian singer Elina Duni was born into a highly artistic family in Tirana in 1981 and first sang on stage at the age of five. In 1992 after the fall of the communist regime, she and her mother settled in Geneva. Soon after, she started classical piano lessons and discovered jazz, before going on to study singing and composition in the jazz department at the Hochschule der Künste Bern. During this time she also [...]
“Traditional music is modal, and often the jazz I play is also modal, which means that I improvise according to a mode, a scale, or in other words, a melody … I think of music as a horizontal and also as a colour … The place where these two worlds come together. Making music in general is a story of encounters.”    
- Elina Duni
 
Swiss-Albanian singer Elina Duni was born into a highly artistic family in Tirana in 1981 and first sang on stage at the age of five. In 1992 after the fall of the communist regime, she and her mother settled in Geneva. Soon after, she started classical piano lessons and discovered jazz, before going on to study singing and composition in the jazz department at the Hochschule der Künste Bern. During this time she also developed the Elina Duni Quartet to explore her musical roots, a combination of Balkan folk songs and jazz. The quartet released its ECM debut, Matanë Malit (Beyond the Mountain), a musical homage to Albania, in 2012.
In 2015 her quartet released its second album for ECM, Dallëndyshe (The Swallow). Duni contrasted this with her first quartet recording thus: it has, she said, “a different groove, a different momentum. It’s become more rhythmic. Sometimes it’s almost a trance-like propulsion.”  The album received great critical acclaim: “a sheer delight,” in the words of UK Vibe’s Tim Stenhouse.
 
Duni has said of her work with the quartet: “We focus all the intensity that the poetry needs. We have tried to convey its essence through our musical interpretation. To me, all improvised music is a jazz state of mind. We feel no obligation to play a song the same way twice.”
 
2018 saw the release of Duni’s solo recording Partir, with the vocalist accompanying herself on piano, guitar and frame drum. Jazz Journal’s Simon Adams called it “an intimate and beautiful recording of love, loss and leaving. Duni’s voice is remarkable, for while it is crystal clear in its multilingual enunciation it is also intimate and expressive in tone. […] Whatever the song, she approaches it with a tentative and in place haunting delivery, fully expressing the longing described in many of the songs.”
 
With Lost Ships (2020) Duni ignited a new chapter in her oeuvre, introducing her quartet with the British guitarist Rob Luft and pianist Fred Thomas as well as French trumpeter Matthieu Michel. The quartet’s follow-up A Time To Remember (2023) was The Guardian’s jazz album of the month, with John Fordham raving, “few contemporary jazz-influenced singers manage to sound so intensely like themselves while drawing on such a variety of genres, languages, and cultural backstories as the Albania-born vocalist Elina Duni.” He went on to call her accompanists “a trio impeccably attuned to her ability to convey intensity with the most delicate yet diamond-bright sounds, cannily improvising in ways that stretch the songs without disrupting Duni’s surefooted control over their shape.”
 
After much touring and intense collaboration over many years, the core-duo of the quartet, Duni and Luft, is captured in pure, undiluted dialogue on the 2026 album Reaching For The Moon.
 
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Date All Primary Artist Composer
YEAR DATE Artist VENUE LOCATION
2026 June 26 Elina Duni / Rob Luft

"Reaching For The Moon"

 Paesaggi Sonori Aquila, Italy
2026 June 27 Elina Duni / Rob Luft

"Reaching For The Moon"

 Music Festival Lugo, Spain
2026 July 04 Elina Duni / Rob Luft

"Reaching For The Moon"

 Brossella Festival Brussels, Belgium
2026 July 18 Elina Duni / Rob Luft

"Reaching For The Moon"

 Montreux Jazz Festival Montreux, Switzerland
2026 July 21 Elina Duni / Rob Luft

"Reaching For The Moon"

 Sligo Jazz Sligo, Ireland Event
2026 August 06 Elina Duni / Rob Luft

"Reaching For The Moon"

 Feminile Singolare Festival Valdagno, Italy Event
2026 August 16 Elina Duni / Rob Luft

"Reaching For The Moon"

 Jazzbühne Lech Lech, Austria Event
2026 August 29 Elina Duni / Rob Luft

"Reaching For The Moon"

 Jazz im Hof St. Pölten, Austria Event
2026 September 25 Elina Duni / Rob Luft

"Reaching For The Moon"

 Jazzimut Festival Saint-Nazaire, France Event
2026 September 28 Elina Duni / Rob Luft

"Reaching For The Moon"

 Teatro del Gatto Ascona, Switzerland Event
2026 October 11 Elina Duni / Rob Luft

"Reaching For The Moon"

 Jamboree Barcelona, Spain
2026 October 25 Elina Duni / Rob Luft

"Reaching For The Moon"

 Enjoy Jazz Festival Heidelberg, Germany Event
2026 December 05 Elina Duni / Rob Luft

"Reaching For The Moon"

 Triskel Arts Centre Cork, Ireland Event
2027 January 19 Elina Duni / Rob Luft

"Reaching For The Moon"

 Bürgerhaus Dreieich, Germany Event