Reaching for the Moon is the first duo album by the Albanian-born singer Elina Duni and the British guitarist Rob Luft, her sixth recording for ECM and her third with him. After the quartet records Lost Ships (2020) and A Time To Remember (2023), they reduce the music to voice and guitar. The programme runs from Irving Berlin's title song to Ornette Coleman's Lonely Woman, and many of its texts allude to the night.
Duni was born in Tirana in 1981 and settled in Geneva in 1992. Luft was born in South London in 1993 and studied at the Royal Academy of Music. They met at a Montreux Jazz Festival workshop in 2017, and their first concerts together extended her solo project Partir, with Luft adding electronics and effects. Here Duni sings and adds hand percussion, while Luft plays guitars and electronics. The album was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines in June 2025, with Gérard de Haro as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.
The repertoire crosses languages and eras: a traditional song from Kosovo, a lullaby by the Persian singer Mahsa Vahdat, Pino Daniele's harbour song Cammina Cammina and Gabriel Fauré's art song Les Berceaux. Two film themes are joined together, Shigeru Umebayashi's Yumeji's Theme and Krzysztof Komeda's Sleep Safe and Warm from Rosemary's Baby, and Duni sings them without words. The three originals, Foolish Flame, Magnolia and Your Arms, are love songs pitched between jazz, folk and chanson, while Lonely Woman is taken very slowly with Margo Guryan's lyric.
In Jazz Journal in May 2026, Simon Adams found that the arrangements, "without the flugelhorn and drums of their previous quartet", make every song more intimate. He called the closing Lonely Woman "Just perfect." Jazzwise made the album an Editor's Choice, with Peter Quinn calling the title track "one of the most ethereally beautiful standard interpretations I've ever heard." Other reviewers pointed to Luft's subtle electronics and, in Jazz'n'More, to his refined use of the volume pedal.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2866, released on 24 April 2026. The booklet includes an English translation of Les Berceaux.
