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tion; even if you play the same song slow or fast, you can dance to the melody. Even if you change the lyrics, you can dance to it.”
“George is always changing the lyrics to songs,” says White of Xylouris, whose fine, grainy vocals grace just one track on Goats: the second-to-last number, Fandamos.
“In Greek tradition they are called ‘mantinades’,” says Xylouris of the fifteen-syllable rhyming couplets, often concerned with love or satire and improvised with dance music, that are recited in the form of a narrative or dialogue in accompaniment to the Cretan lyra or lauto. “Everyone on Crete is writing them. The old ones are passed down; the ones you choose to sing are as important as the ones you write.”
Greek music is always changing and evolving, he adds. It was this fact, along with inspiration drawn from his father Psarantonis, his lute-playing uncle Giannis Xylouris (Psaroyiannis) and his more famous uncle Nikos Xylouris, the late singer and lyra player who was part of the movement that brought down the Greek military junta in 1973, that the young George Xylouris decided to take the unusual step of playing the long-necked Cretan lauto (which is larger than the mainland lute, and has a lower tuning) as a solo instrument.
Did the Cretan folk police object? “Yes, and I cared what they thought,” Xylouris says. “But I still did what I wanted to do. It wasn’t that I was rejecting tradition. I go back to the well all the time. I take what I want from there but am always in a continuum.”
His musical tastes are similarly broadminded: “I love Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, all the big blues players, Ravi Shankar, Paco de Lucia, Oum Kalthoum, the oud player Munir Bashir, the music of Thailand, the country music of mainland Greece, and Cretan music – all the time Cretan music.”
“If we’re in a record shop and George yells, ‘Hey come and check this out’, it will usually be something from the dawn of record- ing,” says White.
Swathes of time on the road have led to new ideas and huge amounts of material for their next eagerly anticipated album. Their conversations, for the most part, are always about music.
“Even at night I am going to bed with my lute and discovering many things,” says Xylouris.
“My cymbal stands get a bit cold in the night,” White quips.
“And almost every morning I have things to say to Jim like, ‘Lis- ten to what I have discovered you can play when you are lying down’. When I strum up it sounds so different, which makes sense. It’s physics.”
White’s already innovative drumming style, all big arms and lan- guid shifts in body weight, has also taken on a new dimension.
“I do this new thing where you hit up,” he says. “It’s been pretty amazing, getting to learn about your own playing style. I don’t use brushes for textural effect as I do with the Dirty Three. I use different sticks and mallets but all the sounds come from the kit. The circulari- ty is kind of ingrained in Greek music, and it’s always been a big part of the Dirty Three, so it’s something I try and bring out.”
A
sked if either musician leads the other, they pause. “It’s both of us,” says White. “I haven’t played in a lot of two-pieces, and the ones that I have didn’t trans- late live; it’s fundamentally easier to make connections with three sounds. I always thought two people have
inbuilt limitations but this really doesn’t at all. The possibilities are endless. I’m playing rhythmically and melodically and so is George, but sometimes it’s as if I’m doing the dance and then he’s kicking his legs up, doing a solo.
“Some Greek dances like syrtos are completely open – everyone does their own thing – while some of the couple dances are very graceful.”
Xylouris picks up the thread: “I think for somebody who doesn’t understand the dance or the words, they can see the pictures. Some- times I feel I am there in the mountains with the snow coming down outside, and there’s a fire on so it’s warm. But sometimes it’s cold…”
“And I feel like I’m the snow,” says White, “and the weather.”
“And I go outside to get some wood,” says Xylouris, “and come back inside again.”
They look at each other and laugh.
“See,” says White with a wink. “There’s a lot going on. “We’re not just up there looking good.”
www.xylouriswhite.com
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