When Giorgos Xylouris, master of the Cretan lute, improvises with the charismatic Australian rock drummer Jim White, the result is musical fireworks that offers a new future to age-old traditions from the island of Zeus.
The lutenist/singer Giorgos Xylouris represents just one branch of a Cretan family of musical royalty. His father, Psarantonis, is a virtuoso on the Cretan lyra. His late uncle Nikos Xylouris, also a musician, played a key role in the protest movement against the military junta. Both – like Giorgos’s uncle Giannis, who taught him to play the lute – had their artistic roots in Anogeia, a herders’ village in the mountains where the folk
tradition has always been kept alive. “It is located close by the cave of Zeus, less than an hour’s drive from here,” says the lutenist, who now lives in Archanes, outside the island’s capital, Heraklion. Together with the drummer Jim White he has settled down in front of a laptop for a Skype session. “The two of us making music over here was the logical next step in a story that goes back over 25 years,” adds the Greek musician, who livened up many a local village festival and dance with his father and other family members when he was young, before moving to Melbourne, Australia. There, he came into contact with the local rock scene, and met Jim white in 1988. Their two bands, Xylouris Ensemble and Dirty Three, would later get together. Despite earlier plans for closer musical collaboration, however, White, now living in New York, went to see his friend on Crete, where Giorgos and his Australian wife had settled three years ago. The first result of their joining forces came out earlier this year: an album entitled Goats that is an inspiring ode to a musical life and to an island with the energy of a continent.
Did people on Crete not find the combination of your two instruments a bit strange? Giorgos Xylouris: It’s true that percussion doesn’t have such a great tradition here, but over recent years it has cropped up increasingly in bands, so the ears of the public have got used to it. And the presence of pop music on television and in ads has something to do with it too, although those drums are always softer. That’s too banal and too slick for us. We don’t just want to relax the audience’s ears: we would rather give them something they can take home and think about afterwards. The recipe for making music these days is too soft for me. If an old guy were to pick up his lyra, young people would probably say, “Sounds good, but we can’t listen to it for long.”
Jim White: We are anything but soft, and yet people all over the world are crazy about us. In Athens, in New York, everywhere, we attracted the Cretan community. But what really strikes me is that they are genuine aficionados. They can feel, too, that something is happening when we play, that our music is tied up with their traditions.
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