Xylouris White is firmly rooted in the past and future. Playing Cretan music (Greece) of original and traditional composition, the band consists of Georgios Xylouris on Cretan laouto and vocals and Jim White on drum kit. Xylouris is known and loved by Cretans and Greeks at home and abroad and has been playing professionally from age 12. Jim White is an Australian drummer known and loved throughout the world as the drummer of Dirty Three, Venom P Stinger and now Xylouris White. For the last four years these two men have been performing as Xylouris White, the culmination of 25 years of friendship forged through music and place.
The New York Times, By Ben Ratliff
Both Born to the Form, a Couple of Continents and Major Traditions Apart
When the lute player George Xylouris was a teenager — growing up in a mountain village on Crete, not far from the Ideon Cave, where Zeus worshipers have been making pilgrimages since the end of Minoan civilization — he was working as accompanist to his father, the folkloric singer and lyrist Antonis Xylouris. When the Australian drummer Jim White was a teenager, he was playing in a Melbourne noise band called the People With Chairs Up Their Noses.
It’s good that they’ve ended up together. Both are extraordinary musicians. From a distance, in market terms, one is a traditional artist and the other a nontraditional one. (Mr. Xylouris has mostly stayed within the music of his culture and family; since the early 1990s, Mr. White has been the drummer for the great instrumental trio Dirty Three.) But up close, during a set at Union Pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Thursday night, the difference was negligible. Onstage, as Xylouris White, they look and play like brothers.
…It’s intense, joyous, rugged music…
Rolling Stone by David Fricke
..Xylouris White…are master musicians bonded by enduring friendship. .. (this was).. my third, live exposure to the duo in five months after dazzling gigs in Iceland and Brooklyn … the dancing broke out right away as Xylouris and White locked into a rolling, modal thunder that I have already compared to the Middle Eastern psychedelia of the American late-Sixties band Kaleidoscope but which also evokes the empathy and elevation of saxophonist John Coltrane’s iconic 1967 duets with drummer Rashied Ali, released in 1974 as Interstellar Space.
Xylouris White; The Holland Threatre
Date and Time
Wednesday Dec 18, 2019
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM EST
