http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/arts/xylouris-white-at-union-pool.html 2014-10-04 00:57:27 Xylouris White at Union Pool Xylouris White, an Australian drummer and a lute player from Crete, are performing at Union Pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this month. === 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 They met while Mr. Xylouris was living in Australia, which has the largest Greek population outside Europe. Both are somewhere around 50, with corkscrew hair, mustaches and elegant, lived-in appearances. Their music starts with old Cretan forms — the brisk, dance-beat sousta and the slow, sung, expressive rizitika — and spreads outward into loose, sympathetic improvisations of uncertain length, the kind of thing that has been at the center of each man’s music for a long time. The traditional job for Mr. Xylouris’s eight-stringed instrument is rhythmic: He’s a riff dispenser. But here he expands the job to play melodically. He and Mr. White played about half the repertory from “Goats,” their first album, to be released by Other Music on Oct. 14, and a lot more; they stopped at 90 minutes but could have gone on much longer. It’s intense, joyous, rugged music, and they will be making it at Union Pool every Thursday this month. With the music’s specific Old World modes and rhythms, you might assume that Mr. Xylouris runs the show. That’s not anywhere near true; the two men have created a hybrid form that they both seem born to. Holding the bottom of his sticks and mallets, drums positioned down low, Mr. White rolled his shoulders and raised his arms to strike as if airing out a sheet; he pushed and pulled the beat, adding short fills and crashes, changing his phrasing, playing with a range of tone from hard slaps to wet thuds, sometimes letting a stick fall on the head of a snare drum, letting it rattle on its own for a second and picking it up.