Reaching For The Moon
Elina Duni & Rob Luft
Reaching for the Moon is the third album from the partnership of Swiss-Albanian vocalist Elina Duni and British guitarist Rob Luft, released on April 24, 2026 via ECM Records and produced by Manfred Eicher. Where their previous two collaborations — Lost Ships (2020) and A Time to Remember (2023) — featured a co-led quartet with pianist/drummer Fred Thomas and flugelhorn player Matthieu Michel, this album strips the music down to its barest essential form: voice and guitar alone. Recorded in June 2025 at Studios La Buissonne in the south of France, the album returns in spirit to the moment Duni and Luft first met at the 2017 Montreux Jazz Festival, allowing their most instinctive and intimate musical conversation to take center stage. As The Guardian has written of Duni, few contemporary jazz-influenced singers manage to sound so intensely like themselves while drawing on such a breadth of genres, languages, and cultural backgrounds.
The album's repertoire is remarkably wide-ranging, moving fluidly between American jazz standards, European art song, traditional Kosovar folk music, film themes, and original compositions. It opens with Irving Berlin's title song and closes with Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman," and between those poles lies Gabriel Fauré's "Les Berceaux," a lullaby by Persian singer Mahsa Vahdat, a ballad from Italian singer-songwriter Pino Daniele, and a medley pairing Shigeru Umebayashi's "Yumeji's Theme" from In the Mood for Love with Krzysztof Komeda's "Sleep Safe and Warm" from Rosemary's Baby. PAN M 360 described the album as containing "pure little wonders of beauty and delicacy," praising Luft's playing as akin to a Renaissance lute player — giving full space to Duni's voice while supporting it in an equally indispensable way, and noting the result as "a journey that resembles a tranquil ascent towards the lunar light."
Reaching For The Moon
Elina Duni & Rob Luft
Reaching for the Moon is the third album from the partnership of Swiss-Albanian vocalist Elina Duni and British guitarist Rob Luft, released on April 24, 2026 via ECM Records and produced by Manfred Eicher. Where their previous two collaborations — Lost Ships (2020) and A Time to Remember (2023) — featured a co-led quartet with pianist/drummer Fred Thomas and flugelhorn player Matthieu Michel, this album strips the music down to its barest essential form: voice and guitar alone. Recorded in June 2025 at Studios La Buissonne in the south of France, the album returns in spirit to the moment Duni and Luft first met at the 2017 Montreux Jazz Festival, allowing their most instinctive and intimate musical conversation to take center stage. As The Guardian has written of Duni, few contemporary jazz-influenced singers manage to sound so intensely like themselves while drawing on such a breadth of genres, languages, and cultural backgrounds.
The album's repertoire is remarkably wide-ranging, moving fluidly between American jazz standards, European art song, traditional Kosovar folk music, film themes, and original compositions. It opens with Irving Berlin's title song and closes with Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman," and between those poles lies Gabriel Fauré's "Les Berceaux," a lullaby by Persian singer Mahsa Vahdat, a ballad from Italian singer-songwriter Pino Daniele, and a medley pairing Shigeru Umebayashi's "Yumeji's Theme" from In the Mood for Love with Krzysztof Komeda's "Sleep Safe and Warm" from Rosemary's Baby. PAN M 360 described the album as containing "pure little wonders of beauty and delicacy," praising Luft's playing as akin to a Renaissance lute player — giving full space to Duni's voice while supporting it in an equally indispensable way, and noting the result as "a journey that resembles a tranquil ascent towards the lunar light."