tarab
Singer, songwriter and guitarist, Carl Cleves, would, even as a child, entertain his siblings and schoolmates with his vivid imagination and captivating stories. After many requests from his friends and fans, Carl decided to write a book.

TARAB narrates the adventures and quests, wanderings and narrow escapes, mishaps and illuminations of guitar-toting troubadour and songwriter Carl Cleves in his many roles as young beat poet, law student, single father, journalist and ethnomusicologist, inmate of hospitals, relief worker in cyclone-struck India, antelope trapper in Uganda, encyclopedia salesman in Bangkok, band leader and recording star in Brazil.

This memoir runs over three decades and includes quests with his "she was not a screamer" partner Beatrice, during the revolutionary independence years of the late sixties in Africa and on the hippy/ spiritual trail in India in the seventies; escapades with his young son Tashi during the eighties in South America and North Africa; tales of calamities and survival set in the interior of Brazil, the Himalayas and recently, on the east coast of Australia.

Click on the title to read one of Carl's stories:

TO COROICO
"From the Valley of the Moon to Coroico
Through the mighty magic jungle
The Altiplano in the snow
The crack of dawn the truck will go."
(from "To Coroico", words and music by Carl Cleves)