Allaudin Mathieu
Allaudin was a disciple of North Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath for 25 years as well as of Murshid Samuel Lewis (Sufi Sam). He studied with composers William Russo and Easley Blackwood and collaborated with Nubian master musician Hamza El Din.
In the 1960s, Allaudin spent several years as an arranger and composer for Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington Orchestras, and was the musical director for the Second City Theater in Chicago (which he helped found) and for the Committee Theater in San Francisco. In 1969 he founded the Sufi Choir which is the soundtrack music in the movie SunSeed - The Journey, and In the 1970s, he served on the faculties of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Mills College.
Allaudin now devotes himself to practice, performance, recording, composition, teaching, and writing from his home near Sebastopol, California.
Much of his teaching centers the power of listening as an instrument of self-discovery and personal transformation. By exploring our capacity for listening to sounds and for making music, we can awaken and release our full creative powers.
"Only to the degree that a musician is healing himself or herself through music can a listener be healed."
OUR MODERATOR
Amertat Cohn
Amertat Cohn is an award-winning American filmmaker, a businessman, a spiritual leader, and producer-director of Sunseed The Journey (2019). Amertat began his career in visual media at 15 as photo instructor at a summer camp and then photo editor and photographer in high school. He graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Wesleyan University, Middletown Conn., in 1965. While there, his photo art was exhibited at the Davidson Art Gallery, and he made his first film as part of its film studies program. He entered the Masters Film program at UCLA in 1965 but dropped out the next year during the "summer of love" and moved to San Francisco. There he began a lifelong study of meditation, yoga, mystic arts, Sufism, and the esoteric traditions of the world’s religions, all while working in the top documentary film unit in the USA at KQED Public Television.His films at that time included From Protest to Resistance, Fidel, The Krishnamurti Lectures series, and A.C.T. Now (1968) which received a Cine Golden Eagle award for direction. He began filming Sunseed, the acclaimed documentary of the world-wide New Age awakening in 1970. He took on the name Amertat, which is the name of a Zoroastrian archangel (his birth name was Fredrick), as given to him by his spiritual guide, Pir Vilayat Khan, while making the film. He received a Master of Fine Arts from UCLA Film School in 1973 for his direction of Sunseed. Its first showing was at the Palace of Fine arts, San Francisco in 1974 and later had its New York premiere at the Whitney Museum in New York City in the New American Filmmakers series, where it became the most viewed film in the history of the series.He has directed several other documentary films, Wynn Bullock Photographer, Sister, Zen in America, and Elliott Porter’s World for which he received his second Cine Golden Eagle award. His photographs were exhibited as part of a group show at the Montserrat Gallery in New York in 2017. In other endeavors, he has created a successful international distributorship and marketing company for Herbalife Nutrition (1998-present) and ascended to the Chairman’s Club by becoming one of its top 50 independent distributors in the world. Amertat is a student of many of the world's great traditions including Sufism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and others. He has lived in the USA, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, India, and in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, since 2006. He also maintains a residence in New York City.