Vassilis Kostas

Vassilis Kostas

Vasilis Kostas is a Grammy nominated laouto player, composer and educator from Epirus, Greece. He has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the Panama Jazz Festival and WOMEX while performing as a soloist with the Berklee World Strings Orchestra and the Chatterbird Chamber Orchestra. As a graduate of the masters program at the Berklee Global Jazz Institute in Boston, he has studied with jazz masters such as Danilo Perez, John Patittuci, Joe Lovano and Terri Lyne Carrington to name a few. His duo album recording “The Soul of Epirus” with the master clarinetist Petroloukas Haklias was voted as the Best Album of 2019 by the Balkan World Music Chart and the album “Crisalida” with Danilo Perez’s Global Messengers was recently nominated for a Grammy as the Best Latin Jazz Album of 2022. He has received the “Artist Fellowship in the Traditional Arts Award” by the Mass Cultural Council and the “Forty Under 40 Award” by the Greek America Foundation based on his efforts to promote Greek traditional music in the United States.

Vasilis Kostas is currently based in Greece where he teaches laouto at the University of Macedonia while presenting and sharing his musical roots and projects in concert halls and academic institutions across the US and internationally.

"At Eleusis, one realises, if never before, that there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy. At Eleusis, one becomes adapted to the cosmos. Outwardly Eleusis may seem broken, disintegrated with the crumbled past; actually, Eleusis is still intact and it is we who are broken, dispersed, crumbling to dust. Eleusis lives; lives eternally in the midst of a dying world."
Henry Miller

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