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, and Mark Levine to internationally recognized blues singer Etta James, Pharaoh Sanders, and the jazz/soul vocal group, The Whispers. His recent compilation of solo performances on acoustic nylon string guitar, In The Wee Hours, was released in May 2026 on OA2 Records to immediate critical acclaim (see Home page). His 2022 quartet recording of original compositions, Refuge, featuring Keith Saunders on piano, Robb Fisher on bass, and Ron Marabuto on drums received excellent notices, was named a Downbeat Editors’ Pick (see Reviews page), reached the top 30 on the JazzWeek radio charts, and Downbeat named it one of the best recordings of the year. The quartet’s prior 2018 CD, Mostly In Blue also received excellent notices and, it too was named by Downbeat as one of the best recordings of the year. 

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Cotsirilos’s earlier trio and solo recordings have been similarly well-received. For example, his trio CD, Variations 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, while its immediate predecessor, Past Present received wide acclaim, including praise from the San Francisco Chronicle for its display of “sublimely fluid jazz guitar skills” and its presentation of “about as tight a jazz trio as you’ll ever be lucky enough to hear.” Cotsirilos’s first acoustic solo CD, “Silenciosa,” a compilation of jazz tunes performed on solo classical guitar was characterized by All About Jazz as “a superb solo guitar recital.” Prior to those releases, in addition to working as an accompanist, Cotsirilos was co-leader of the San Francisco Nighthawks, a group including legendary drummer Eddie Marshall, Bobby McFerrin pianist Paul Nagel, and former Cal Tjader bassist Robb Fisher, and which released an eponymously titled recording on Monarch Records. An earlier quartet recording including Marshall, Nagel and Fisher was released in 2011 by Jazz School Records as part of the Bay Area Jazz Archive Series. 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.