Elina Duni and Rob Luft — 11 October 2026, Jamboree (Barcelona)

JazzFolk & World

The Swiss-Albanian singer and the British guitarist bring «Reaching for the Moon», the first album they’ve recorded as a duo

Elina Duni, on vocals and percussion, and Rob Luft, on guitars and electronics, play Jamboree’s Sala 1 on Sunday 11 October in two sets, at seven and half past eight. General admission is 28 €, members pay 24 €. The venue’s listing shows both sets as sold out.

They met in 2017 at a Montreux Jazz Festival workshop and have since recorded two albums for ECM as a quartet, “Lost Ships” (2020) and “A Time To Remember” (2023). “Reaching for the Moon”, released on 24 April this year under ECM catalogue number 2866, is the first they’ve made as a duo alone.

The repertoire runs from Irving Berlin, with the title track, to Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman”, which closes it. In between are Pino Daniele’s “Cammina Cammina”, Gabriel Fauré’s “Les Berceaux” set to a poem by Sully-Prudhomme, the Persian lullaby “Leili Lullaby” by Mahsa Vahdat, a track linking Shigeru Umebayashi’s “Yumeji’s Theme” with the song Krzysztof Komeda wrote for Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby”, two Kosovar pieces — the traditional “Ani More Nuse” and Ahil Koci’s “Zambaku i Prizrenit” — and three originals of their own. They sing in Italian, French, English, Albanian and Persian.

The album was recorded in June 2025 at Studios La Buissonne, with Gérard de Haro at the desk, mastered by Christoph Stickel and produced by Manfred Eicher. It’s Elina Duni’s sixth for ECM.

Duni was born in Tirana and left Albania at age ten to settle in Geneva. The venue lists both sets as sold out and has announced no third.

Text by Aina Torrents