In “Aquarelles: Celebrating the Inner Child” (out in March, 2024 on Greb Osby’s Inner Circle Music), the pianist and composer Lefteris Kordis presents a double album full of captivating and beautiful Mediterranean-inflected jazz compositions. The 12 ‘Aquarelles’ (‘watercolors’) - are conscientious sound paintings, adroit & engaging reflections on a series of memories, mentors and heroes both personal (a story of family migration, an early seminal piano teacher, etc.) and public (the great Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, and the politically courageous internationally renowned composer Mikis Theodorakis, and with whom Kordis performed as a precocious 18-year-old). And the band swings, expertly, across a diverse but clearly brethren set of musical idioms. Kordis takes influence from Jazz (of which he’s been a serious and busy practitioner, backing Osby, Shelia Jordan, Joe Lovano, Steve Lacy, etc.), from the Scriabin and Shostakovich he ingested in prodigious early classical studies, from a variety of Greek folk styles in which he’s fluent, and even from medieval Byzantine chant. The sound-painting is vivid. In the first Aquarella, Harris Lambrakis, a precise & lyrical master of the ancient end-blown Ney, illustrates a grandmother’s refugee journey, in the embers of World War I, from Asia Minor to the ancient town of Elefsina, outside of Athens, where Kordis was born. And, in Pastor Randy Coplin, when we hear Jerry Bergonzi, the rightfully venerated Boston tenor saxophonist, hold forth with both poise and abandon, it seems an apt musical portrait of the spiritual leader at Boston’s historic Columbus Ave AME Zion Church, where Kordis served for many years as organist and choir director. An energy of youthful dance is felt throughout, even in the more somber moments (Aquarelles 2 and 8 engage with some of life’s inevitably challenging experiences), but especially when Kordis, drummer Dor Herskovitz (from Israel), bassist Brad Barrett (from Texas), and Edmar Colon (from

Puerto Rico, on piquant soprano), are all playing around each other and the Parker’s-Confirmation- through-a-prism theme that is Aquarella 4: Danza del Sol.

The diverse cast of musical voices also includes Lefteris Bournias, a contemporary master of traditional Greek clarinet language, the virtuosic and in-demand Peruvian-born bassist Jorge Roeder, Israeli drummer Eviatar Slivnik, and the Catalan guitarist Isaac Romagosa, among others. It’s a cosmopolitan crew befitting a musician with an international perspective, and a member of the select faculty at Berklee’s Global Jazz Institute (to which Kordis was recruited by director Danilo Perez, and where Romagosa and Colon were both students, among a plethora of up and coming stars.) To be clear, “Aquarelles” is no pastiche or slapdash assembly. Kordis fully digests and transforms (and is transformed by) the varied musics on which he has been raised, leaning into the commonalities and the universalities, always singing through his fingers with a soulful humanity. It’s a great addition to an impressive body of work, the 7th album, by an inspiring musical global citizen from whom we’ve surely much more to hear.