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Carl Cleves, troubadour and author, was born in Mechelen, a Flemish town in Belgium. Studying traditional African music with ethnomusicologist John Blacking in South Africa, started off years of travel throughout Africa, the Middle East, the Orient, the Pacific Region and South America, guitar in hand, acquiring musical skills and an endless supply of stories and songs. His adventurous life has included stints as an antelope trapper in Uganda, relief worker in cyclone struck India, foreign correspondent and ethnomusicologist in Africa and night club crooner in the South Pacific. While living in Brazil he became a popular recording star and bandleader. He is the author of the trilogy Tarab: Travels with My Guitar, an epic memoir of high adventure and the search for musical ecstasy, and the ASA award winner for Best Australian lyricist. ‘Songs both intimate and powerful’; ‘a vision whimsical and wise’; a guitar style ‘utterly captivating, pregnant with unexpected nuance’.