geokoo (Giorgos Koutras)

Giorgos "geokoo" Koutras is an Athens-based guitarist, composer and music educator. He started out playing classical guitar and ended up somewhere closer to gypsy swing.

He was a core member of The Swing Shoes & Sugahspank!, whose debut album "Ladies & Gents, Here's the Swing Shoes" came out in 2009 on Prominence Recordings. Along the way he has played and recorded with Psarantonis, the Xylouris family and Doros Demosthenous, and, further afield, worked with producer Lucas Mayer on the Lucas & Iris Fuzaro project in Brazil.

He picked up his first guitar at 15, taught himself for a couple of years, then went properly into formal studies at 17: a guitar diploma from the Piraeus Municipal Conservatory (class of C. Kotsiolis), the full theory ladder of harmony, counterpoint and fugue, a degree in European Culture, and later a master's in music pedagogy from the University of Nicosia.

Since that first guitar, mandolin, banjo, slide guitar and clarinet have all found their way into his hands and into his writing. His compositions lean on tone colour, counterpoint, polytonality and some deliberately diagonal harmonic choices, with enough room left for things to go a bit random. He has written original scores for film and documentary, including "17N: Rise and Fall" from Alexis Papachelas's Fakeloi series.

He has taught guitar at the Skalkotas Conservatory and, before that, at Ars Musicalis (2018–2025), and has run private lessons since 2007. In 2019 one of his students took first prize at the musicArte national guitar competition. He founded and still runs Orchestra Sol, a youth orchestra built around ear-playing and improvisation rather than reading off a page, and between 2023 and 2024 led music education sessions inside Korydallos prison as part of a Greek National Opera outreach programme.

He is the author of "Around the World with One Guitar" (Andromeda, 2018), a 2014 collection of Renaissance repertoire for classical guitar, and a forthcoming classical guitar method. He teaches in Athens and online; his lessons, method and recordings are at geokoo.com.

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