Lost Ships is the first album credited jointly to the Albanian-Swiss singer Elina Duni and the British guitarist Rob Luft. It gathers songs of love and exile they had been developing together since 2017. Albanian and Mediterranean folk song is still at its centre, but jazz ballads, French chanson and American folk song now sit beside it. Six of the twelve songs are their own joint compositions.
The pair first worked together at workshops in Lausanne. For this recording they are joined by the English multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas on piano and drums and by the Swiss flugelhornist Matthieu Michel. The album was recorded in February 2020 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, with Gérard de Haro as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. On her previous album, Partir (2018), Duni had played every instrument herself. Here she concentrates on her voice and sings in Albanian, English, French and Italian, while the migration crisis and ecological decline run through the lyrics.
The record opens with Bella Ci Dormi, a traditional Italian song, and moves between the duo's originals, two Balkan traditionals and a pair of well-known covers. The title song, which the German magazine Jazzthing read as an allegory of the fate of refugees, starts from a quiet piano introduction by Thomas before voice and guitar take over. Frank Sinatra's I'm A Fool To Want You is slowed almost to a halt and sung close to a whisper. Luft colours his guitar with discreet electronics, and the last three songs, ending with Charles Aznavour's Hier Encore, are played by voice and guitar alone.
Duni's fourth album for ECM was widely reviewed across Europe. In BBC Music Magazine Roger Thomas heard an affinity with the chamber jazz of Norma Winstone, but proposed a different description for Duni's voice: "intimately operatic". Writing in Jazz Journal in January 2021, Simon Adams praised her "crystalline" multilingual delivery and Michel's warm commentary on the vocals, and found the album "evocative and intensely moving". Several critics also noted how much space the arrangements leave around the central pairing of voice and guitar.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2689, first released on 13 November 2020, with liner notes by Duni and Luft and the song texts in English translation.
