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EUROCANA: MUSIC FOR THE PEOPLE — George Cole Quartet Forges a New Sound from Two Worlds!
There's a word you haven't heard before — but once you hear the music, you'll never forget it: Eurocana.

     Americana is the sound of the American experience — swing, jazz, and the Great American Songbook distilled into something honest and deeply human. Eurocana takes that same spirit and runs it through the fire of European gypsy jazz. The result is something entirely new, and yet it feels like it's always existed. "When I heard this music I knew it was for me," says BAMMIE Award-winning guitarist George Cole, the man behind the concept. "I would learn it and share it with the world." Decades later, that's exactly what he's doing — with an urgency and gratitude that only someone who has stared down their own mortality can truly understand.
     A San Francisco native and longtime guitarist for the David Grisman Quintet, Cole recently fought and beat leukemia. Now in remission, he approaches every performance as a gift — to his audience, and to himself. "Life is short," he says simply. "This music is a gift and I intend to share it for as long as I can." That spirit is inseparable from the music itself. Cole has spent his career living at the crossroads of American swing and the gypsy jazz tradition of Django Reinhardt — and Eurocana is where those two roads finally meet. New American swing and valses played with gypsy flair: joyful, soulful, and built for people who love music that means something. Django passed away in 1953, but his music has never been more alive — heard in concert halls, jazz clubs, and festival stages around the world, and nowhere more joyfully than in the hands of the George Cole Quartet.
     There's a particularly fitting connection to Piedmont itself. For six years, Cole taught guitar to two East Bay kids who would go on to change rock and roll history — Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt of Green Day, both Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees. Armstrong, who still calls Piedmont home, has remained a friend: "George Cole was more than a guitar teacher to me. He was a mentor that talked about great music, great songs, good taste, and everything in between. I feel grateful and lucky that he showed me how to express myself with a guitar."
     David Grisman, who personally tapped Cole to join the legendary David Grisman Quintet, calls him "a major guitar talent who plays everything from gypsy jazz to rhythm & blues — he's helped me take Dawg music in many new and wonderful directions." Bringing Eurocana to life is the George Cole Quartet, an all-string acoustic ensemble: George Cole on guitars and vocals, Valentino Cole on guitar, the incomparable Anton Patzner on violin, and Fred Randolph on upright bass. Together they deliver something you simply won't hear anywhere else — a sound that transports you, moves you, and sends you home humming.
     Eurocana isn't just a concert. It's a genre being born in real time — music for the people, played by masters. George Cole has faced the worst and come out the other side playing better than ever. When he takes the stage at Piedmont Center for the Arts, every note will mean something. Don't miss it!