Elina Duni Quartet: Matanë Malit (Beyond The Mountain)

This is a very special album, one that combines two forms of music that I appreciate immensely, Balkan folk music and jazz. I don’t claim any particular expertise in writing about either, so bear with me if I make mistakes or fail to adequately describe it. Elina Duni was born in Albania and lived there until she was 10 and the Communist regime fell. Her family then settled in Switzerland, where she studied classical music before finding jazz. It wasn’t until recently, though, that she delved into the folk music of her homeland, and on this album, Matanë Malit, she and the superb jazz trio that she performs with – pianist Colin Vallon, bassist Patrice Moret and drummer Norbert Pfammatter – fully develop the unexpected connections they find between the folk and jazz forms.

In a teaser video on her website, Duni describes the album as a tour through Albania. It’s also a musical tour de force, thanks to her powerful but restrained vocals and the band’s mastery of this subtle and intricate music. Hear it on the opening track, the tender love song “Ka Një Mot (For a Year)” in the video below. It opens with Duni singing unaccompanied, then slowly enter light percussion, piano and bowed bass, the music forming a light bed for the song and its uneven rhythm. Then the piano opens up the song into something like a hymn as the lovers are united after their long wait, and Duni in wordless vocalising soars gently with the music, then above it, in an impressive exhibition of crystaline vocal prowess.

The rest of the 12 tracks flow through common folk themes: hero ballads, sad and bitter songs of love thwarted or lost, laments of young brides left alone when their husbands must emigrate to find work, a cautiously jaunty number about a man waiting at the village well for the girl he wants to kiss, a pastoral about shepherdesses who long to change traditions, and an elegy for family members languishing in political prisons. On “Kristal,” a tragic love song penned by Duni, the texture of her voice and the way she uses it remind me of the most sublime of bossa nova singers. I am particularly moved by “Erë Pranaverore (Spring Breeze)” a contemporary folk song written in 1962 and banned by the Communist government for its jazzy sound and subversive lyrics:

It flies, it flies in the joyful sky. There is a spring breeze everywhere. Where life is pulsing, where new and grand buildings spring up for us.

And by the jubilant Kosovar wedding song “U Rrit Vasha (The Girl Has Grown Up)” with its exciting drum work, the Monk-like piano chording, and the way the bass carries the dance’s rhythm while Duni’s voice curls snake-like around the beat.

The production and recording on this album, the quartet’s first for the premiere jazz label ECM, are brilliant, as are the performances. It’s exciting to see this kind of musical innovation coming out of such a downtrodden and war-torn region, and just exciting, period, to be swept away by this sublime work.

(ECM, 2012)