My review of Elina Duni's Partir, today at All About Jazz.

Sometimes a change in musical direction is instigated by life experiences; sometimes it's driven by nothing more than choice. Following two recordings for ECM Records with her Switzerland-based quartet, Elina Duni makes a significant directional shift with the entirely solo Partir. Given the generally introspective nature of 2012's Matanė Malit (Over the Mountain) and 2015's Dallёndyshe (The Swallow), it's no surprise to find Partir even more intimate still, the Albanian-born singer accompanied by nothing more than her relatively spare but carefully constructed contributions on piano, guitar and percussion.

Partir's genesis stems, indeed, from both a life change and a simple matter of choice. Duni had already fashioned a career as a solo artist, its genesis dating back to 2008, when she began performing songs in-between readings by her mother, novelist/poet/essayist Bessa Myftiu. With the singer largely self-accompanying on guitar or percussion, she gradually built a repertoire, leading to solo concerts where the singer connected songs with her own texts, driven conceptually by the growing refugee crisis and more direct impact of her own relocation. With the dissolution of a longstanding personal relationship leaving the future of her recent quartet, at the very least, in temporary stasis, now seems like the perfect time to document Duni's solo work.

Partir's twelve songs are sung in a surprisingly expansive nine languages, and delivered with extraordinary linguistic credibility, with much of the material drawn from Albanian, Kosovan, Armenian, Macedonian, Swiss and Arabian-Andalusian traditions.

But even Duni's approach to the album's four relatively contemporaneous songs is redolent of Partir's pan-cultural undercurrents. The opening "Amara Terra Mia" ("Bitter Land of Mine") may have been written by Italian singer, songwriter, actor, guitarist (and, later in life, politician) Domenico Modugno, but in its rubato intro it's impossible not to hear the musical embellishments that are part of this Balkan expat's DNA. And as when her simple, nylon-string guitar accompaniment provides the song a more definitive rhythm, Duni's haunting, painfully plaintive voice renders the translation of its lyrics (provided in the CD booklet) as almost unnecessary, their aching loss felt through Duni's clear and deep connection with Modugno's prose.

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