Xylouris White

Please join us for a performance by Xylouris White, the indefinable improvising duo project of lute player Georgios Xylouris and drummer Jim White.

Firmly rooted in the past and future, Xylouris White play progressive Cretan music through both original and traditional compositions. Born and raised on Crete, the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, Georgios Xylouris is a member of a clan long regarded throughout Greece as musical royalty. To hear Xylouris play his long-necked laouto and sing songs of love and liberty in his impassioned, distinctive voice, is to experience tradition at its finest.

Having first commanded international attention in the mid-1990s with the acclaimed Australian instrumental trio Dirty Three, Jim White is now the go-to guy for alt-A-list vocalists with collaboration in mind. Those who’ve worked with him – a staggering list that includes PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Will Oldham, Cat Power and Smog – testify to his deft way with a rhythm, a downbeat, a jazz-fuelled wig out.

David Fricke of Rolling Stone wrote that the duo are “master musicians bonded by enduring friendship…locked into a rolling, modal thunder [comparable] to the Middle Eastern psychedelia of the American late-Sixties band Kaleidoscope but which also evokes the empathy and elevation of [Interstellar Space], saxophonist John Coltrane’s iconic 1967 duets with drummer Rashied Ali.”

The duo’s fourth album, The Sisypheans, draws on the philosophical bent that suits their music’s ancient headwaters. Xylouris and White meditate on the life of a traveling musician, Sisyphyan in its repetition, but inspired in an eternal recurrence of themes and techniques that allow them to climb ever further into their experience as players.