Tuatara - Latest Musical Adventures

NEW Tuatara album with legendary Sufi poet Coleman Barks

"The Hear And The Gone" Released November 18th

Experimental band Tuatara is proud to announce the upcoming release of its first collaboration with esteemed poet and Rumi scholar Coleman Barks. The album, titled "The Here And The Gone" will be released worldwide on November 18th on Fast Horse Recordings.

Tuatara was founded in 1996 by drummer and composer Barrett Martin, formerly of the Screaming Trees, and Peter Buck, founding guitarist of REM. Coleman Barks is of course widely known for his best-selling "The Essential Rumi", a collection of Rumi poems that changed world consciousness around Sufi poetry. He is also Professor Emeritus at the University Of Georgia and has over 33 books published under his name. This will be the 7th studio album for Tuatara.

The collaboration between Tuatara and Coleman has been a decade in the making, which began when Coleman first took the stage with the band at a 1997 show in Athens, GA, reading one of his brand new poems, to which Tuatara spontaneously composed music. Guest appearances on two Tuatara albums in 2007 followed, and the journey continued when Coleman came to Santa Fe, NM in December of 2007 to record with the band at Barrett Martin's Fast Horse Solar Studio. The spirited and humorous sessions yielded over 25 song-poems, of which 16 were culled to create "The Here And The Gone." Special guests on the album include Iraqi oud master Rahim Alhaj, REM guitarist Scott McCaughey, and University Of Georgia professor and musician, Kai Riedl.

The album is a journey that encapsulates some well-known Rumi poems, as well as several of Coleman's deeply insightful, often humorous original poems. This new "Band of Brothers" is currently plotting select tour dates in America and Europe beginning in early 2009, a tour that will certainly be one of the more exciting collaborations between these veteran musicians and a master wordsmith.