Sebastopol, California website
Gentle Readers, Loving Family,
I seem incapable of writing a formal “bio” of facts and dates where all the juice has been squeezed from the fruit. So here with my blessing is some of the fruit with some of the juice, a nourishing read, I hope.
I was born in 1937 into an, intellectual, upwardly mobile Jewish family. My early memories are of loving parents who cherished my older sister and me. I had a more internal than external life then as now, and my ear was caught early on by music. I studied piano formally from age six to fourteen and showed (i.e. showed off) noticeable aptitude but, by age thirteen, mid-century jazz had become my obsession. My Dad hired an inspiring teacher, Buddy Hiles, the reigning prince of Cincinnati’s Black music scene. I was unconditionally accepted by him and the musicians around him, and invited to be an apprentice among them. They called me Buddy’s boy. Such was my first experience of unvarnished, pure musical transmission.
From middle school through high school I led a believable jazz dance band, played gigs around town on piano and trumpet, arranged and composed music for Buddy’s big band, and got terrible grades. Nonetheless, on the basis of a concerto I wrote for the high school orchestra, during my junior year I was accepted as an early entrant to the University of Chicago. At age seventeen I left home with a few tears and an enormous sense of the miracles yet to come.
During my college years I studied privately with William Russo, my second real music teacher, who had spent years writing for the Stan Kenton band, the band whose music had become my passion. On occasion, Kenton generously rehearsed my music but didn’t hire me. I finished my U of C Hutchins BA in 1958 as only a B student, but a student who in fact had been trained to think, to read, and to write. In a moment of clarity I signed up for an MA in English under Norman Mclean. At the end of the first semester, however, Stan Kenton in fact did hire the twenty-one-year old me to be a staff arranger and composer for the band.
I spent 1959 writing music for Stan Kenton and traveling on and off with the band as a trumpet player. In the fall of that year an album of my arrangements was recorded and released on Capitol Records, and though that was quite an honor, I’d had enough of the life of a jazz road musician. Subsequently I wrote some music for Duke Ellington, Maynard Ferguson, and the Four Freshman, and began writing a theory column and record reviews for DownBeat Magazine, but oncoming miracles were crowding those ones out.
The day I left the Kenton band I was asked to be a founding member of the Second City, the highly influential and first commercially successful troupe of improvising actors. Many of these were older U of Chicago graduates and I suddenly found myself in a socially aware, uniquely talented crew of theatrical crazies. Their musical director/pianist was, at twenty-two, the baby of the company but per force I grew up fast. Those years were heady, collaborative and enormously creative, and we got famous (to the eventual detriment of all) almost overnight.
The theater work gave me ample private time to become a better musician and, the student being ready, the next true teacher appeared. Easley Blackwood (b.1933) was an up-and-coming American composer and newly hired professor at U. of Chicago, who quickly became my friend. After a short while, in exchange for a lid of weed a week, Easley became my musical mentor as well. He taught me the Eurocentric lineage of classical music, which I adored but had scarcely understood. For five years we had a lesson every week, and I learned the evolution of the western ear by studying the history of its music, its infrastructure, and its masterpieces. I practiced relentlessly six hours a day.
In 1966 I married Kay (Hafiza) Mathieu, adopted her two kids, Atha and David, and began to increase the family population. We agreed to move to San Francisco, where a job with the Second City’s sister theater, The Committee, awaited me. We arrived in 1967, just in time for the blooming of the Haight and The Summer of Love. The next wave of miracles was about to be revealed.
In the spring of 1968, Hafiza led me to the Sufis. The story of my meeting with Murshid Samuel Lewis the founding of the Sufi Choir with Murshid’s blessing, and my initiation by him has been often told, and the the more complete version is in print, as I will mention. Since my spiritual and musical family of Sufis has been such a touchstone in my subsequent life, however, I’d like to speak of the clan of musicians who, after Murshid Sam himself, collectively became my next true teacher: the singers Halima Anderson, Vasheest Davenport, Shabda Kahn, Mihrunissa Douglass, Moinuddin Jablonksi (among many others): the instrumentalists, Huzur Nawaz Coughlin, Baba Maize, Dara Young; collaborations with Zakir Hussain, the dancer Zuleikha, and the Grateful Dead, among many others. Hafiza and I had two daughters together in 1967-68, Lucy Amadea and Amy Moon. We were then a family of six. I got a good job at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, was playing nightly at The Committee Theater, and continually being blessed by the music we of the Sufi Choir were making. In 1968 our family moved into a proper house in San Anselmo. In the early 70s, since I seemed to be the only Sufi with a sufficient income to guarantee a mortgage, I became the title holder of the Mentorgarten but after a few years, like an idiot, I sold it back to the Ruhaniat for a dollar.
In 1977, the Sufi Choir ended its first iteration with a run of seventeen performances of Tarot!, a full-length opera with a libretto by Wali Ali, my music, lyrics by Mary Tillinghast, and the members of the choir depicting each of the archetypes from the Major Arcana. The lead character, the World card, was sung sublimely by Halima Anderson. Over one hundred community members were involved in the production. After a hiatus of fifteen months, Moineddin convinced me to start up the choir again, and the second life was just as enriching as the first, if a bit more sane. That choir lasted four years. In 1993 I encouraged Aamil Targow to begin a new choir under his directorship, and the New Sufi Choir, for eleven busy years, was devoted, original, and in tune! In 2020, I gathered a total of about thirty-five singers to record all the choir music I’d written over the decades that had never been recorded. Altogether there are twelve Sufi Choir albums available as CDs or downloads. Also several regional choirs have sprung up for the joy of communal singing, a deep form of spiritual practice.
I met Pandit Pran Nath in 1971, began studying North Indian raga with him in 1974, was initiated as disciple in 1987, thus fulfilling Murshid Sam’s surprising prophecy during my 1969 bayat, during I was accepted as his mureed “for the time being.” Murshid knew I would find the path to my music guru, the man who would become my musical north star, and he was right. With open-hearted patience, Pandit Pran Nath steered me to the marriage between ancient modal purity and modern harmonic practice. The dual guidance of Murshid Sam and Pandit Pran Nath has become the heart of my music and my teaching. There is one other Sufi who also has received this transmission from the very same Murshid and the very same Guru: Pir Shabda Kahn.
In the early 1970s, Hamza El-Din, the Nubian vocalist and oudist, was welcomed into the Sufi family, delighting and instructing us. Hamza and I quickly bonded, and for thirty years he became my big brother, friend, collaborator, and mentor of African sensibilities. Also during this time I had the benefit of Rabbi Zalman Schachter’s guidance. I had never undergone my Bar Mitzva ceremony, so at age thirty-seven, after a year of learning the Hebrew and music for the ceremony, I was thus honored with his blessing. Another important teacher: from 2001 to 2021 Devi and I were in a Mahamudra sangha led by Donna McLaughlin; our emphasis was on the simple clarity of continuous presence.
From 1974 to 1980 I taught classes in music theory and practice at Mills College. In 1979 I was initiated as a Sheikh, took mureeds and led Gatha classes. I’ve taught at about twenty Sufi camps, and continue to teach the Ruhaniat online. In the late 80s, however, it became clear that my karma was to devote my life to composition, recording of my works, and teaching music one-on-one to devoted musicians—disciples of music, one might say. Gradually I released my Sufi mureeds and my sadhana as a dedicated composer/musician/teacher began. But then another miracle arrived: I was instructed by Murshid’s voice (among others’ including my own) to write books. I knew I had something to say that had not yet been said. Thus began the long journey of a diligent if reluctant author. Five books ensued, reaching (so far) over 100,000 readers—each my cherished companion. Along the way I’ve been encouraged by poet Coleman Barks (who calls words those silver-tongued deceivers), and by Saadi Douglas-Klotz, a writer who does not allow words to eclipse the wordless illuminations of the realized inner life.
Devi and I became partners in 1982 and were married in 1987. Devi is the light of my life, my musical collaborator; we sustain each other in a kind of heaven world that is our daily life together. She is also my first reader and sharp-eyed editor whose literary insight has saved—or deleted—many a paragraph. Now, when I look around at other couples in the Murshids’ Circle and the larger Sufi family I think, Yep, Murshid taught us how to love.
For the last forty-five years I have been living surrounded by green trees and peaceful neighbors under the beacon of transmission from many illuminated souls known and unknown. My commission is to guide, through my craft and aesthetic, as I myself have been guided by so many illuminated ones. In this spirit, I am honored to be recognized as a Murshid by the Ruhaniat circle of senior teachers, each of whom undoubtedly, has a version of this transmission story to tell.
Thank you for reading this far—it’s been a long story of a long life. In 2023 my memoir, The Shrine Thief, was published by TerraNova/MIT Press and the story there, you can be sure, is longer: more fruit, more juice. All of my books and recordings, plus photos and more are displayed at Cold Mountain Music.