About Me
Born in Corinth in 1955, Nikos Touliatos started playing drums, self-taught, in 1971. His personal style came into being through the experience he acquired playing various types of music for many years with traditional musicians, composers of modern music, and Greek and foreign jazz musicians, as well as through improvised music.
Following are some of the musicians he has worked with: Mikis Theodorakis, Manos Loizos, Thanos Mikroutsikos, Gunter Sommer, Herman Naehring, Mra Oma, Fredy Studer, Mark Abrams, Michelle Vurcio, Peter Kowald, Savina Giannatou, Giotis Kiourtsoglou, Haig Yatzitzian, David Lynch, Andreas Georgiou, Minas Alexiadis, Takis Farazis, Giorgos Fakanas, Vassilis Soukas, Ross Daly, Kyriakos Sfetsas, Haris Xanthoudakis, Floros Floridis, Don Parker, Andreas Symvoulopoulos, Andreas Mniestris, Stavros Emmanouil, Giorgos Zikogiannis, Anatoly Vapirov, Christina Andreou, Dimos Dimitriadis, Antony Donchev, Stoyan Yankoulov, Elitsa Todorova, and others.
He has taken part in plays, he has collaborated with visual artists, dancers, actors, and Greek and international directors; he has staged and presented multi media performances in Greece and abroad. He has written music for the cinema, for short films, and for the theatre. In recent years, he has worked in the cinema and on live music for silent films, using works by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy for programmes in Attica schools run by the General Secretariat for Youth.
He has taken part in international festivals, playing a wide range of music: World Festival of Contemporary Music in Vienna, Festival of Lille with the Nouveau théâtre of Belgium, the Glasgow Opera, the Edinburgh Festival with theatre 7.84, and at the Roote Liede festival in Berlin for two consecutive years. He played at the first International Percussion Festival in Lefkada, at Saint Louis University, at Soweto and Pretoria in South Africa with the Secretariat for Greeks Abroad, at the Festival Mediterraneo, at the European Jazz Festival in Morocco, the International Jazz Festival in Varna and Bansco in Bulgaria, the international jazz festival in Rome, the Croussis Percussion Festival in Petroupoli, Greece, the international jazz festival in Izmir, the international percussion meeting in Lisbon, and others.
Over the years, he has created and participated in various contemporary and jazz music groups. In 1985, he created the group Percussion Workshop (Ergastiri Krouston), with which he gave performances throughout Greece and in many countries abroad. In 1993, he created the largest percussion orchestra ever (about 30,000 people) with the participation of the audience.
He has received awards in many festivals in Greece. In the past 20 years, he has pioneered the use of a variety of objects as percussion instruments, and has made his own percussion instruments, including a classic set of drums, and produces unique chromatic sounds.
He collaborates with the manufacturers Pearl, Paiste and Carbostick.
He established the first school for drums, percussion and jazz music in Greece, and has taught percussion in many schools at all levels of education: music elementary, junior and senior high schools all over Greece, in drama schools and in the Department of Music Studies at the Ionian University on Corfu for eight years.
He has given seminars and lectures in many cities in Greece and abroad.
He has written three books in Greek:1. Method of studying drums,
2. Rhythm (exercises in rhythmic solfège)
3. Shouting with a Cymbal? Autobiography.
Touliatos also served as artistic director of the International Percussion Festival in Lefkada, and as Board member of the organisation Music Groups – Municipality of Athens. In addition, he organised and was artistic director of the International Croussis Percussion Festival. As a producer, he has organised dozens of festivals, concerts, and seminars with musicians from Greece and abroad.
He took part in the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games 2004 with a group of 400 volunteer drummers and the group Echodrasi, and in the Closing Ceremony with a group of 30 musicians, dancers and actors using athletic objects as percussion instruments, in his own composition.
Credits: Background from Yahoo search result
