For four years now, the famous saxophonist Dimitris Vasilakis has been trying to put Rhodes on the map of the islands, which stand out not only for their seas, but also for their music. Thus, the International Jazz Festival is preparing to take place for another year at the Palace of the Knights and the Ancient Conservatory of Rhodes from 27 to 30 August.

The festival will bring together great jazz musicians from Greece and other countries, as well as from neighboring Bodrum (the festival is twinned with the Bodrum Jazz Festival), among which will be the Cretan Maria Manusaki with her special musical language.

Searching for her latest album Hidden Trails (2018) will give you an idea of ​​what we mean when we say “idiom”. Manusaki and Dimitris Verdinoglu (keyboards), Michalis Eudaimon (bass) and Alekos Rupas (percussion) combine the sound of jazz with Cretan music. Don’t be alarmed, you won’t hear the bass-accompanied mandinades, but Manusaki’s violin makes the Cretan footage feel intimate and atmospheric against the jazz beat that keeps the rest of the set going.

Interestingly, Manousaki has nothing to do with traditional music. Her training in Greece and abroad has been exclusively in jazz violin and foreign music, and her path is connected with jazz and the New York scene where she lives. But in recent years, as she said in an interview, she began to listen to Crete’s music and integrate it into her own sound and in her own way. In Rhodes, he will appear on the last evening of the festival at the Conservatory of the ancient acropolis of the island.

However, it is worth saying a few words about the rest of the musicians participating in the festival. Among them will be the promising Cypriot saxophonist Marios Charalambous and his quintet, the Puerto Rican Sekina Rodz, the Turkish trio Tanini, who combines jazz with the canon, and the American saxophonist Craig Bailey, who collaborated with the great Ray Charles.