About Irini Konstantinidi

With her lyrical, expressive, and impressively clear sound, vocalist Irini Konstantinidi has achieved a very personal and refined interpretation of jazz and has been established as one of the most prominent Greek jazz singers.

Reviews about Irini have highlighted her vocal brilliance, impressive tonal range, and flexibility. The audience and the press refer to her as the jazz voice of pure crystal that’s very exciting when she’s improvising! Her playful and creative approach to vocal improvisation and jazz phrasing makes her music performance unique. Scat singing is like an extension of her storytelling and imagination. Jazz is a game and she loves playing it!

Irini also enjoys writing lyrics for either her own discography or for jazz standards (mainly for Wayne Shorter’s compositions), giving them a fresh interpretation with her adventurous phrasing and thought-provoking words.
Her lyrics are inspired by her experiences and perception of the meaning of life. Her musical ideas derive from melodies that come up mostly while she’s scatting during a walk. A simple stroll that clears the mind offers a blank canvas for Irini to draw her musical sketches on.

Her colleagues agree upon her versatile ability to combine a delicate vocal sound with a charismatic presence on stage. She is a performer who has something to say: one who loves developing new ideas on the spot while improvising and is strongly connected to the flow of performance whenever she sings. From a Thelonious Monk jazz standard song or a Wayne Shorter piece with her lyrics to the original compositions or projects she undertakes, Irini always gives her true self and creates her own artistic rendition of the material.

Irini’s inquisitive character and growth mindset led her to take a break from her well-established career as a jazz vocalist in her home country and start traveling. So in 2016, she decided to move to Holland, to pursue her dreams of expanding her horizon, network, and academic credentials. During her stay in The Netherlands Irini completed her Master’s in Jazz Vocals at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague, in 2018. Collaborating as a lyricist and vocalist in collective jazz projects and discography with The Wonderfall Quartet (2010-2015) in Greece and with Nomadic Treasures (2017-2018) in Holland, she performed in numerous jazz festivals and prestigious jazz venues in both her country and The Netherlands.

In the meantime, she started writing her own songs, that would showcase her elegant musical identity. Returning to Greece in the summer of 2020, Irini formed her new Greek jazz group and recorded the songs for her personal studio album “Nothing to lose”, at Sierra Studios (Athens), in November 2020. Having the intimate feel of a personal diary, this album contains original songs and unfolds Irini’s joyful personality and jazz finesse. “Nothing to lose” (released on April 2, 2021) comes as the reintroduction of  Konstantinidi’s jazz voice to the audience, under her own name this time and with her artistic signature as a songwriter, producer, and arranger.

Passionate about jazz and improvisation, she dares to take the less-traveled path, one that leads to the innermost connection to the music and her honest emotions. Her voice represents the clarity of the Greek blue sea, her soul reflects the lightness and subtlety of a butterfly and her effortless singing delivers the freedom of a migrating bird.

As an educator, Irini aspires to transfer her passion for scat singing, improvisation, and spontaneous creativity to anyone that wishes to dive into the magical and playful world of jazz. She is dedicated to transmitting her passion for jazz phrasing, and inspiring a deeper initiation into the inexhaustible magic of improvisation, in the beauty and authenticity of instant composing as well as in the essence of the musical interplay. Jazz is a universal language and, therefore, learning to “speak Jazz” is priceless. “Phrasing” is a major topic that has not been emphasized well enough in jazz education yet. In her Master’s Thesis at The Royal Conservatoire of The Hague (NL) with the title “Phrasing and Interplay from the vocal point of view – Phrasing as the vocalist’s tool to stimulate interplay within a jazz combo” (2018),
Irini has been exploring techniques and ways to help singers develop those phrasing skills that will make them an active participant in the interplay of the jazz group and not just the voice that sings the theme.