The Elina Duni and Rob Luft Duo – Songs of Love and Exile @ Kings Place, London. Oct. 22

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