It’s sometimes said that jazz vocals are supposed to sound like the singer, not the song. Departed legends from Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald to Mark Murphy and Betty Carter have epitomised that, as idiosyncratic muses such as Cécile McLorin Salvant and Gretchen Parlato continue to do today. But few contemporary jazz-influenced singers manage to sound so intensely like themselves while drawing on such a variety of genres, languages, and cultural backstories as the Albania-born vocalist Elina Duni.
