It’s sometimes said that jazz vocals are supposed to sound like the singer, not the song. Departed legends from Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald to Mark Murphy and Betty Carter have epitomised that, as idiosyncratic muses such as Cécile McLorin Salvant and Gretchen Parlato continue to do today. But 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.
A Time to Remember is Duni’s ninth album and second with the UK’s Rob Luft (guitar), Fred Thomas (piano/percussion), and Switzerland’s Matthieu Michel (flugelhorn) – 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.
In its mix of Duni/Luft originals with European, American, Kosovan and Albanian traditional songs, A Time to Remember complements the same band’s cinematic 2020 ECM album Lost Ships. But Duni’s and Luft’s travels have since taken them on expeditions to the Sinai Desert and the Red Sea, and a sense of appreciative awe touches much of this music, particularly the pair’s daydreaming, note-gliding title track and the wordlessly rapturous, cymbal-shimmering Dawn.
Duni’s excited gasps on the turns of the skipping Albanian traditional E Vogël (Little One) evoke a child’s impetuousness, while the beautiful Charlie Haden ballad First Song opens on Luft’s echoing Bill Frisell-like effects, and unfolds in Duni’s softly yearning delivery of the Abbey Lincoln lyrics. Send in the Clowns, a much-covered tough call for any singer, similarly manifests this fine vocalist’s remarkable capacity for expressing strength and resolve by the most reticent of means.
Also out this month
Guitar legend John McLaughlin and percussion master Zakir Hussain implausibly tot up 153 years between them – not apparent from the scything electric guitar lines, furious tabla virtuosity, and groovers that sound like south Indian hoedowns on This Moment (Abstract Logix), a 50th anniversary set by 1970s east-west proto-global ensemble Shakti.
Also in the imperishable-nostalgia bag is Soft Machine’s Other Doors (Dyad Records), an idiosyncratically hip and earthy set by the quartet featuring guitarist John Etheridge and reeds player Theo Travis. It nurtures the legacy of the late 60s psychedelic art-rock mavericks, with remakes of two Softs classics – Penny Hitch and Joy of a Toy – on the tracklist.
Imaginative young London composer/bassist Jonny Wickham makes a striking debut on the coolly Brazilian-angled Terra Boa (Fresh Sound New Talent), an engaging mix of airy and snappily staccato vocals, smoky horn solos and sophisticated ensemble arrangements.