Elina Duni (vocals and
tambour); Rob Luft (guitar) plus, for 3 songs, James Kitchman (guitar).
This was a concert of
music for the twenty-first century nomad including songs from Germany,
Scotland, the Balkans, all four corners of the Mediterranean and on further
south into Africa. Songs from across the ages as well; the oldest piece is from
Egypt in the 1300s. Duni’s rich voice is set against a palette of Rob Luft’s psychedelic
space folk from that hitherto unexplored point where Pat Metheny, John Martyn
and Steve Hillage meet. Using more
pedals than the Raleigh factory, Luft and his trusty Gibson semi-acoustic
archtop uses echoes, loops and reverb to create an orchestra behind Duni as her
voice rises through the scales to a full force impassioned wail and drops back
to a whisper.
Duni treats each song as
a dramatic vignette as she inhabits each character at the heart of the lyric.
Thus, during the second song, Bella Ci
Dormi, a tragic Italian piece she is passionate, singing of yearning and
loss, dramatically reaching out. On another she is a Parisian boulevardier,
scatting her way up the scales indulging in a little call and response with
Luft’s guitar.
Lamma
Badaa Yatathana is the ancient Egyptian number with
Luft’s delicately plucked Arabic swirls and Duni’s gentle hand drum, it’s
another dramatic performance. Luft plays dazzling, crystalline single note runs
reminiscent of Metheny in his early days. One of the high points of the first
set was an Albanian folk song which originated in Pristina in Kosovo in the
1960s. It’s another song of loss and Duni’s character seeks the help of the
moon to find her lover. Luft plays a simple single note motif which subsumed
into a series of dense flurries; Duni fills the song with tragedy and we feel
like voyeurs, intruding on private grief. As her despair builds so does the
guitar ringing out and echoing. The audience is enraptured.
Another song talks of
being at one with nature, as she says in the introduction, at the point where
things are exactly as they are supposed to be. It opens with a fragile
waterfall of notes. As Duni sings in the upper register Luft conjures up images
of dappled sunlight in a forest. The music is a light dance with hints of the
song's Albanian folk origins. She sings of more pressing current woes in My Rainbow, a song about migration and
exile. As she curses the years of separation her voice is enveloped in the
guitar tones, tragedy writ large.
Hexham lad James Kitchman
joins the duo for Luiz Bonfá’s The
Gentlemen. The extra musical voice fills the bottom end of the sound providing a foundation over which Duni’s
sultry vocal and Luft’s crying guitar take the lead. He stays on stage for Wayfaring Stranger, a Scottish by way of
America tune of heartbreak and hope, resignation and acceptance. The two
guitars are seamless, there’s a wash of reverb and delicate silver filigree
picking and in Duni’s voice there’s still a trace of her origins, enough to
make the song hers. They close with some joyous African hi life. The guitars
challenge Duni’s voice as she runs up and down the scales, Luft adding in extra
flourishes. Kitchman providing some solid ground under all of Duni’s and Luft’s
sonic acrobatics. Dave Sayer
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