Joel Lyssarides & Georgios Prokopiou
Biography Joel Lyssarides & Georgios Prokopiou
Joel Lyssarides
is a name that may be unfamiliar to many outside his home country of Sweden, but his recordings have already become some of the most listened to in European jazz, with over 50 million streams on Spotify alone in recent years.
This success isn't the result of a calculated musical strategy. "As much as I am delighted that many people seem to love my music so much that they want to listen to it over and over again, the impulse always comes from within me. Me and my piano are the center of my musical world."
From this point, his journey takes him in various directions, performing in jazz clubs, festivals, and tours with jazz, classical, blues, and pop artists.
Despite his versatility, jazz remains the core of Joel Lyssarides' work. In his childhood home, records by Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and many others played a pivotal role and served as the initial inspiration. Later influences included artists like Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and Gonzalo Rubalcaba. He studied jazz in Stockholm and Rome, and soon after, he received numerous national and international jazz awards and accolades.
For Joel Lyssarides, jazz is not a stylistic straitjacket but rather a language, a vocabulary on the path to personal expression. He lives in seclusion in a house in the woods, about half an hour outside Stockholm. He prefers to compose at night, in silence, without distractions. This state of mind is reflected in his music, which is strongly influenced by space, sound, and mood.
However, especially now, after more than a year of isolation due to the pandemic, Joel Lyssarides and his trio are more eager than ever to venture "outside." First to the studio, where their debut album on ACT is set to be released in early 2022, and then onto stages across Europe to share their music not only virtually but also "live and in color" with audiences.
