Elina Duni Quartet

Matanë Malit (Beyond the Mountain) is the ECM debut of the Albanian singer Elina Duni and her quartet, and a homage to Albania. She sings traditional songs from her homeland and its diaspora, plus new music shaped in the same tradition, with a jazz trio that treats each song as material for improvisation. "It's about serving the song," Duni says, "and about reclaiming and reinventing it."

Duni was ten when she left Albania in 1992. In Tirana her family, like many artists and intellectuals, had kept away from folk music, which the state had turned into propaganda for socialist themes. Her way back to the songs came after classical music, blues and jazz standards. While both studied at Berne's Hochschule der Künste, pianist Colin Vallon urged her to sing in Albanian in the duo they formed in 2004. The quartet is completed by Patrice Moret on double bass and Norbert Pfammatter on drums. After two albums for Meta Records, Baresha (2008) and Lume Lume (2010), they recorded this one in February 2012 at Studios La Buissonne, near Avignon, with Manfred Eicher producing.

The songs are of lovers, heroes, workers, shepherds and exiles, with songs of resistance among them. Seven are traditional and arranged by the group. The opener Ka një mot, by Muharrem Gurra, starts with Duni alone before percussion, piano and bowed bass slowly enter. Her own Kristal sets words by the novelist Ismail Kadare, and the Kosovar wedding song U rrit vasha runs on energetic drums and a bass line that drives the dance. Vallon often sounds like an answering voice at the piano. "I never wanted to be a singer with backing trio," Duni says, and she gives the players room to improvise while she uses her voice as another instrument.

For Tom Moon on NPR in 2012 it was a "transfixing collection", in which Duni is "poised but fierce as she stretches the themes". He heard traces of Maurice Ravel and Bill Evans in the chords around her. Gary Whitehouse in A Green Man Review praised her "powerful but restrained vocals" and on Kristal compared her phrasing to the finest bossa nova singers.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2277, first released in September 2012, with the lyrics and English translations in the booklet.