The Albanian-born singer will be awarded the prize during a ceremony scheduled to take place on June 28, before the artist’s concert at the Jazz Ascona festival.

An artist with an intense and refined voice, Duni is now under contract with the prestigious ECM Records and has already received the Swiss Music Award in 2017.

In a press statement issued by the festival’s organizers, Elina Duni is being honored “for her extraordinary talent and ability to create a poetic and exciting musical language, carefully combining jazz and the traditional music of her homeland.”

Under the contract with ECM Records, Duni has released two albums, namely Matanë Malit (2012) and Dallëndyshe (2015). She recorded Partir in 2018, an album in which she also shows her qualities as a multi-instrumentalist, after beginning collaboration with guitarist Rob Luft. The album release was followed by Lost Ships (2020) and A Time To Remember (2023), both recorded with Rob Luft, Fred Thomas, and well-known flugelhornist Matthieu Michel.

Born in Tirana in 1981 into a family of artists, Elina Duni began performing when she was only five years old for Albanian Radio and TV. After the fall of the communist regime, she moved to Geneva with her mother, where she studied classical piano before dedicating her studies to jazz. At the HKB, Hochschule der Künste in Bern, she perfected her training, studiying and focusing on composition and improvisation.

Duni founded the Elina Duni Quartet together with pianist Colin Vallon and Patrice Moret (double bass) and Norbert Pfammatter (drums), creating a project capable of fusing jazz with the evocative sounds of Balkan folk.

/r.e//a.f/u.sh/