George Cotsirilos

Originally from Chicago, George Cotsirilos has been a member of the San Francisco Bay Area jazz community for many years and has performed with a wide variety of artists, from San Francisco jazz fixtures like Eddie Marshall, Mel Martin, Pharaoh Sanders and Mark Levine to internationally recognized blues singer Etta James, Bill Evans bassist Chuck Israels, and the jazz/soul vocal group, The Whispers. In addition to working as an accompanist, he was co-leader of the San Francisco Nighthawks which included legendary drummer Eddie Marshall, Bobby McFerrin pianist Paul Nagel, and former Cal Tjader bassist Robb Fisher. The group recorded for Monarch Records and performed at various venues, including the Monterey Jazz Festival. The George Cotsirilos Trio’s most recent CD, Variations, received excellent notices, made it well into the top 100 CDs on the jazz radio charts and was chosen by erstwhile Washington Post jazz critic and Jazztimes editor, Royal Stokes, as one of the most notable jazz instrumental CD’s of 2013. Variations’ immediate predecessor, Past Present, also was released to laudatory reviews and  broke into the top 40 jazz albums nationwide. In May of 2011, as part of the Bay Area Jazz Archive Series, Jazz School Records released Seems To Be by the George Cotsirilos Quartet, featuring Eddie Marshall on drums, Paul Nagel on piano and Robb Fisher on bass. Cotsirilos’s well-received solo CD, Silenciosa, released on OA2/Origin Records, is a compilation of jazz tunes performed on solo classical guitar. Cotsirilos graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, studied jazz with esteemed musician/educator Warren Nunes, and studied classical guitar privately through the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.