Tuatara & Coleman Barks

The Here and the Gone

originally published November 19, 2008

This newest album by Tuatara is a real chore. Musically, it’s not particularly dense or overtly challenging, but neither is the music, really, the focus of the album. It is the readings by poet Coleman Barks, internationally known for his best-selling translations of 13th-century poet Jalal Al-Din Rumi, which make The Here and the Gone (Fasthorse Recordings) a solid task. While the band plays its brand of cinematic instrumentals, Barks voice doesn’t simply arrive in the mix. It descends upon the listener with both the familiarity of an uncle telling a story and the authority of a master speaking to students. Listening is a chore but not a drudgery. Neither, however, is it an immediate joy. That comes with getting into it.

Barks first collaborated with Tuatara spontaneously during a performance at the Georgia Theatre in 2001 when he performed a spoken-word tribute for late Athens writer John Seawright while the band composed on the spot. “That was my first and only collaboration with them before this CD," says Barks. "The full collaboration was Barrett Martin's idea, but I was pretty quick to go along with it.”

This is the seventh full-length release for Tuatara, and The Here and the Gone features founders Barrett Martin (Screaming Trees), Peter Buck (R.E.M.), Scott McCaughey (R.E.M.), Kai Riedl (Macha) and Rahim Alhaj. Presumably there are more players on the album, too, however no other information was provided. Ultimately, this is of no matter. For as much as this album is meant to display a collaboration between Tuatara and Barks, it is Barks who shines here. Barks’ own poetry on the album, which also features several Rumi pieces, speaks in a voice steeped in the quietly observant Deep South.

When asked about the difference in process between his original work and his Rumi translations, Barks says, “When I approach Rumi's words and images, and the spiritual information coming through, I try to disappear as much as possible… With my own personal poems, I intentionally get in the way. My poems are grounded in the events of my life and in my responses to those events, the death of my parents, the emerging of grandchildren, all that.” As one would expect, though, the rewards of each process are different. “In the Rumi poems, the work there is about getting back in touch, in a mystical sense, with those whom I have been apprenticed to for my soul-growth,” says Barks.

Barks’ voice blends into itself quite often when listening. He annunciates clearly, but listening to him speak, a process in which the listener is forced to pay attention, is the task spoken of earlier. Thus, the listener won’t “get” everything even in the first hundred times this record is played. Because the music moves the poetry along a specific rhythm, one must adjust his ears to receive what Barks is saying. “The act of reading a poem on a page is one of the wonderful ways we have of intensifying life, of revving consciousness into new regions... but there are other ways of taking in words, and I like to experiment with using music, all kinds of music, and with speaking the words along with the music," says Barks.

The Here and the Gone is a bit long at 16 tracks, and the longer one listens the less necessary Tuatara seems to be. I could have just as well, and honestly preferred, to have spent the entire experience listening to an unaccompanied Barks and let his words form their own music.

Gordon Lamb