Pianist, composer and Inner Circle Music recording artist, Lefteris Kordis, has established himself as a unique voice in the Mediterranean Jazz genre. He grew up in Elefsis, an ancient and multicultural town near Athens, Greece. Since age four, he studied, performed, and composed based on a wide spectrum of genres including Greek Folk, European Chamber, and Jazz.
Kordis started on piano at age 4, ingesting broad swaths of the classical tradition and soon-thereafter, jazz. Before he turned 18, he had performed with legendary Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis. That was an excellent start to a career that’s seen him supporting many maestros in Jazz (Steve Lacy, Sheila Jordan, Jerry Bergonzi, George Garzone, Joe Lovano, Greg Osby, Robin Eubanks), and Greek Folk (Panayotis Lalezas, Glykeria, Vasilis Saleas), at festivals and major venues (Carnegie Hall, Panama JF, Toronto JF, Athens Epidaurus Festival), worldwide.
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 and choir director at Boston’s historic Columbus Ave AME Zion 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 the Ionian University in Corfu.
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).
