George Cotsirilos Trio: Variations

Variations:  The promise of the trio's previous recordings has come to emininently satisfying fruition (George Cotsirilos)
San Francisco based guitarist releases third trio album
Hans Koert

In the fall of 2013 George Cotsirilos third album Variations has been released. George Cotsirilos is a sought after guitarist at the west coast of the US, who has been playing with dozens of artists ...... from Eddie Marshall, Pharoah Sanders and Mark Levin up to great names since the 1990s with Bobby McFerrin, Paul Nagel and Robb Fisher, all part of the San Francisco Nighthawks. 
The album Variations is his third album as a trio, featuring himself: George Cotsirilos  at the guitar, Robb Fisher on bass and Ron Marabuto on drums.  George labels his trio-mates as  .. two stellar musicians …. with whom he  plays together for years and  makes the trio more then the sum of three equally important musical parts together in a format that allows the space for maximum interaction.

• The album contains ten tracks, all but three his own compositions which learns  …. that there’s still plenty of life in the mainstream guitar tradition.   George says: I aimed for three things when making Variations. First, I wanted to capture the deeper communication that’s been progressively building between the members of the trio.  Second, I wanted to express more diversity in terms of instrumental color.  That’s why George can be heard on electric and acoustic guitars ….  Dynamics and tempo were also kept in mind: soft versus loud, slow versus fast – the trio is comfortable with these variables and I wanted to have them as part of our core sound. And, last but not least, I wanted to take advantage of the space a trio provides.

The opening track, A Walk For Ethel leads the tone  … Swinging mainstream jazz, as played in the 1950s and 1960s ….  Or what to say about a ballad like I Know You Know? Both belong to my favorites, like But Beautiful, which surprised me ….

George Cotsirilos (promo photo)

I found a video fragment which expresses the music of this trio …. The George Cotsirilos Trio can be heard in a live performance at a previous album Pasty and Present in a tune called Good Wood.



And if you want more?  Enjoy a fragment of On the Rebop: 



Both film fragments are from previous albums ....... 

A great album by jazz guitarist George Cotsirilos ... a fluent bop-oriënted stylist who mates a sparkling tone with fleet fingered lines, harmonic ingenuity, melodic acuity and a gift for letting space  .....  Worth to find a copy!

Hans Koert

editor
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Recently the San Francisco-based guitarist George Cotsirilos released his third album, entitled Variations.  He is labeled as   a fluent bop-oriënted stylist who mates a sparkling tone with fleet fingered lines, harmonic ingenuity, melodic acuity and a gift for letting space  ....  A jazz-guitar trio that proofs that there is plenty of life in the mainstream guitar tradition.

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