Personal circumstances underscore
Elina Duni's fifth album and third for ECM. Unlike its predecessors,
Partir finds the Albanian-Swiss singer/songwriter going it alone for the first time, apart -- perhaps permanently -- from her quartet due to the ending of a long-term relationship. In charting a new course,
Duni accompanies herself on guitar, piano, and percussion, embracing these 12 songs in nine languages about love, loss, and leaving. It's a departure from the Albanian-only songs that comprised her two previous outings, and instead reflects the tenor of her solo concerts. In the short epigraph she provides in the liner notes,
Duni writes, even before a word has been sung: "We are all departing, bound to be torn away, one day or another, from what we love."
She sets the stage in opener "Amara Terra Mia," an Italian waltz by 20th century icon
Domenico Modugno and lyricist Enrica Bonaccorti.
Duni's alternately strummed and fingerpicked guitar holds space for her vocal: "Endless skies and faces like stone/Calloused hands now hopeless. Goodbye, goodbye my love, I am leaving/Bitter land of mine, bitter and beautiful…" She follows it with her own "Let Us Dive In," a lilting ballad performed on piano where she portrays loss as a shared burden: "Let me look at you my love/As we dive under and above our 'whys'/It's been good til here/We made it through til here…." Even more powerful is the 19th century Egyptian song "Lamma Bada Yatathanna," by poet and musician Muhammad Abd al Rahim al Masloub.
Duni plays a frame drum known as a daf. Her protagonist has been struck by a beauty so profound she is left confounded, desolate: "Who will alleviate my suffering of love and torment/except the King of Beauty…Mercy, mercy, mercy." She examines her themes in familial expressions, too, as in the Yiddish folk song "Oyfn Weg" and "Vishnja," a traditional song from Kosovo, about the bond that exists between mother and daughter. Both are leaving songs, but in the former, the leaving child may or may not be speaking from beyond the pale. In "Kanga e Kurbetit," another song from Kosovo, she sings as a mother and bereft lover raising a son alone. Its time frame spans more than 20 years. As it develops, her sense of loss deepens, not dissipates, as she alternates carving and cleaving meaning from her life. The totality of separation experienced through exile is rendered as ravaged beauty in her reading of
Jacques Brel's "Je Nai Sais Pas."
In the music made with her quartet,
Duni consistently blurred lines between jazz, folk, poetry, chanson, and other traditions. In performing solo, these already thin lines vanish; they're replaced by the intimate, authoritative weight of her voice writing a mapped, annotated language that juxtaposes tender abundance (the past) with the raw experience of lack (the present). On
Partir,
Duni enters the realm of the profound: Her voice does not hold within it the grain of separation, but is instead that grain personified. ~ Thom Jurek