Pianist, composer, and Inner Circle Music recording artist Lefteris Kordis has established himself as a distinctive voice in the Mediterranean jazz genre. He grew up in Elefsis, an ancient, multicultural town near Athens, Greece. From the age of four, he studied, performed, and composed across a wide spectrum of styles, including Greek folk music, European chamber music, and jazz.
Kordis began playing piano at age four, absorbing the breadth of the classical tradition before quickly turning to jazz. Before the age of 18, he had already performed with legendary Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, an auspicious start to a career that would see him collaborate with leading figures in jazz such as Steve Lacy, Sheila Jordan, Jerry Bergonzi, George Garzone, Joe Lovano, Jay Clayton, Greg Osby, and Robin Eubanks, as well as prominent Greek folk artists including Panayotis Lalezas, Glykeria, and Vasilis Saleas. He has performed at major festivals and venues worldwide, including Carnegie Hall, the Panama Jazz Festival, the Toronto Jazz Festival, and the Athens Epidaurus Festival.
Lefteris Kordis, as well as the music he writes, is truly ‘worldwide’. In addition to the aforementioned genre masteries (Jazz, Greek Folk), Kordis brings a musicologist’s ear for the un-tempered harmonies of ancient Byzantine chant. Not to mention, a couple-hundred Sundays experience as the organist/pianist at the Antioch Revelation Baptist Church. Given that broad variety of musical languages fluently spoken, one understands his recruitment by Danilo Pérez to teach at Berklee’s Global Jazz Institute, and his recent appointment to design and co-direct the hybrid “Jazz and Mediterranean Music” Master’s joint program between the Ionian University and the Sibelius Academy-Uniarts.
Lefteris Kordis writes and plays so that all these genre boundaries are ever artfully-blurred, and sometimes erased entirely. It’s a water-color kind of art, he tells us by the title of his new, and 7th album, Aquarelles, which features a shifting ensemble of Jazz and Greek Folk heavies (Jerry Bergonzi, Lefteris Bournias, Edmar Colon, Jorge Roeder, Harris Lambrakis, Eviatar Slivnik, among many others).
