Chasing Traces with Alina Amuri
18 May sees the release of soul singer/songwriter Alina Amuri’s second album “Chasing Traces” on Columbia/Sony Music. Recorded in Hamburg, Zurich and Berlin, the album is a collaboration between Amuri and the Hamburg-based AmberYard production team as well as the songwriter, Walter Esposito.
Born in Congo, Alina Amuri arrived in Switzerland at the age of two. She loved dancing even as a child, learnt to play the flute and joined the children’s choir of the Zurich Opera House. Later on, she became a sought-after backing vocalist, singing with outfits as diverse as Namusoke, afro-funkster Professor Wouassa, reggae group Kid Jango and the Scrucialists, and rapper Stereo Luchs. She also contributed some of her own tracks to a number of compilation albums before she recorded her full-length debut “Be One With Me” in 2015.
The seeds for “Chasing Traces” were sown during a lengthy trip to Africa where she spent several weeks with a group of Egyptian nomads. Here, she says, she found a new kind of beauty as well as the “peace and quiet” she needed to think about her life and her back-story, a life between roots that she barely knew and a country where she grew up but could never really feel at home in.
“Chasing Traces” is an intriguingly diverse and richly detailed album of soul music with a touch of reggae and a sense of melody clearly influenced more by Africa and Europe than contemporary US R&B.
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