The Spiritual Nature of Playing Music

For years, I’ve been on a musical journey that has evolved far beyond mastering chords, scales, technique, or repertoire. Those things still matter enormously to me, and I continue to practice, study, listen, and try to improve as a guitarist. But increasingly, I’ve begun to feel that all of that work is preparation for something deeper: the ability to get out of my own way and simply serve the music.

Recently, through diving deeply into Mike Longo’s The Rhythmic Nature of Jazz, and through my ongoing studies with Ronan Guilfoyle, I’ve been thinking more and more about the spiritual dimension of playing music. I don’t necessarily mean “spiritual” in some mysterious or supernatural sense. I mean what happens when we stop trying so hard to control music and begin listening to it, feeling it, responding to it, and allowing ourselves to participate in something larger than our own individual performance.

Pythagoras is often quoted as saying, “The highest goal of music is to connect one’s soul to its Divine Nature, not entertainment.” Whether or not we take that statement literally, the sentiment resonates deeply with where I am in my musical life. I have always wanted the music I play to uplift people, but I am beginning to realize that I cannot necessarily accomplish that by consciously trying to make something uplifting happen.

In fact, the harder I try to force music to become meaningful, impressive, emotional, or profound, the more likely I am to interfere with it. One of the most important things Ronan has ever said to me is extraordinarily simple: “The music is not about you.” The longer I sit with that sentence, the more profound it becomes.

The Music Is Not About You

Musicians spend an enormous amount of time thinking about ourselves, even when we believe we are thinking about music. We wonder whether our solo was good, whether we made a mistake, whether somebody liked what we played, whether we sounded sophisticated enough, or whether another musician sounded better than we did. All of those thoughts are perfectly understandable, especially for musicians who care deeply about what they do, but none of those questions is actually about the music.

They are questions about us, and there is an important difference. Ronan once suggested to me that instead of asking, “How well do I play the guitar?” the better question is, “How well do I play the music?” That distinction may appear subtle on the surface, but I think it completely changes the center of attention.

I am a guitarist, and I have spent most of my life developing a relationship with the guitar. I love the instrument, and I have devoted countless hours to learning what it can do. But the guitar itself is not the point; it is an instrument in the literal meaning of that word, a vehicle through which something else happens.

Ronan once described this in a way that has really stayed with me: we essentially farm our voice out to our instruments. The guitar has been assigned the physical job of producing the vibrations through which my musical voice can be heard. The music, however, is not contained in the guitar, and ultimately my identity as a musician should not be contained there either.

A saxophonist chose a saxophone, a drummer chose drums, a pianist chose piano, and I happened to choose guitar. The instrument is supposed to represent us, rather than the other way around. That is why the phrase “play music, not guitar” has gradually become one of the most important musical ideas in my life.

Caring Deeply Without Forcing the Outcome

There is another idea that has been important to me lately, although I find it much easier to understand intellectually than to actually practice. My wife and I sometimes listen to Bashar, channeled by Darryl Anka, and one of the ideas frequently expressed there is essentially to follow your highest passion as fully as possible while refusing to insist upon a particular outcome. That is a challenging idea for someone like me because I take music very seriously and naturally want the music I play to sound good.

When I go to a gig, I want the band to sound good, I want my own playing to feel good, and I want the people who hired us to be happy. If I am improvising, I want my solo to be musical, and if I am leading a band, I want the whole performance to succeed. Yet I have repeatedly noticed a strange paradox: the more intensely I demand that the music sound good, the more likely I am to interfere with the very conditions that allow good music to happen.

Kenny Werner summed this up in his typically provocative way when he said, “The more you care, the worse you sound.” I don’t interpret that statement to mean that musicians should become indifferent or stop caring about music. To me, it means that we have to learn when caring is useful and when it becomes an obstacle.

I care tremendously when I practice, prepare repertoire, study rhythm, work on my technique, listen to great musicians, and make sure I am ready for a performance. All of that caring belongs before the downbeat. Once the music begins, though, perhaps the most useful thing I can do is relinquish my demand that anything particular happen and simply start playing.

Getting Out of the Way

Some of the best gigs I have ever played have been performances where I simply showed up relaxed and had fun. There is a good example of this on my live album Come Out and Play, where we performed “All of Me,” a song that I personally don’t consider especially difficult. I had no tremendous artistic agenda for the tune that night, and I certainly wasn’t standing there thinking that I needed to create some definitive statement on “All of Me.”

We were simply having fun, and I ended up playing ideas that I don’t normally play. One phrase led naturally into another, and I wasn’t searching through my vocabulary deciding which lick, scale, or device I should use next. I was listening, reacting, enjoying myself, and allowing the music that was happening in that particular moment to tell me what might happen next.

To me, that recording is a good example of getting out of the way of the music. I don’t mean that in some mystical sense, as though another force took control of my hands or I somehow disappeared. I simply mean that I stopped interfering with the natural musical process by imposing an agenda on it.

I think the same thing happens in life far more often than we realize. We decide in advance how something has to turn out, and then we become tense trying to produce that result. Sometimes our attachment to the outcome becomes the very thing preventing us from responding intelligently and creatively to what is actually happening.

What Does “The Zone” Really Feel Like?

Musicians and athletes often talk about being “in the zone,” and I think there is something very real about that experience. Michael Jordan has described moments in basketball when everything seemed to slow down, and athletes in many sports have reported similar experiences. Obviously the external clock hasn’t changed, but their perception of space, time, and possibility seems to expand.

I experience something comparable when I am playing at my best. I am definitely not thinking about scales, chord-scale relationships, theoretical concepts, or technical exercises, because I have already done that work. At that point, the work has served its purpose and it is time to enjoy the music.

There are certainly performances where I am less relaxed, and during those times I may start thinking consciously about the things I practiced. When that happens, I usually don’t sound as good, because part of my attention is now devoted to evaluating, calculating, or controlling what I am doing. When I am truly in the flow of the music, that internal commentary largely disappears.

I also want to be precise about what it means to “hear” what I am going to play. It is not necessarily that I hear an entire phrase completely formed in my imagination before my fingers play it. It is more that I hear the phrase I am currently playing truly and deeply, and because I have heard it deeply, it naturally informs the next phrase and the timing of when that phrase should happen.

The process becomes something like hearing, responding, hearing again, and responding again. I don’t consciously stop and decide what the next phrase should be, because the previous phrase and everything happening around me have already provided the information. The more completely I am listening to the present moment, the less I need to manufacture what comes next.

This reminds me of something drummer Jim Black said that Ronan shared with me. Black described himself not primarily as a player, but as a listener, saying that the main difference between attending a concert and participating in one is that when he is playing he has the ability to physically respond to what he is hearing. I love that idea because it reframes improvisation from constant invention into heightened listening and response.

Rhythm as the Gateway

This brings me back to Mike Longo, because one of the biggest changes in my musical thinking has been recognizing how much rhythm governs almost everything we experience as music. Rhythm is not simply the drummer’s responsibility, nor is it just one chapter in a theory textbook that comes before harmony. Rhythm shapes nearly everything we hear and feel.

A pitch without rhythm is essentially just a pitch. Rhythm gives that pitch placement, duration, shape, direction, and relationship to the sounds around it. Once you begin thinking this way, it becomes difficult to separate melody from rhythm because every melody is also a rhythmic event.

Ronan has described rhythm fundamentally in terms of space and relationships, which has become enormously useful to me. Where is this note in space, where is it in relation to the pulse, and where is my phrase in relation to what the drummer or bassist is playing? Where does the silence belong, and how does what I just played affect what somebody else might play next?

When I think about rhythm this way, it stops feeling primarily mathematical. It becomes relational, because every musical event gains meaning partly through its relationship to other events. That, to me, is one place where the spiritual dimension of rhythm begins to reveal itself.

Rhythm Is Relationship

If “the music is not about you,” then rhythm gives us an extraordinarily practical way to experience that idea. Your phrase exists in relationship to the pulse, your notes exist in relationship to silence, and what you play exists in relationship to what everyone else is playing. Music constantly reminds us that we are not operating in isolation.

A great ensemble is therefore not simply a collection of musicians simultaneously demonstrating how well they can play their instruments. It is a living network of listening and response, where one person plays something, another person hears it, and that response changes what happens next. When the musicians are truly connected, the music becomes something that no individual player could have created alone.

This is also why leaving space matters so much. Space gives something else permission to happen, whether that is another musician responding, the resonance of the previous phrase settling, or simply the listener having time to absorb what has just happened. If I play continuously, I may be preventing myself from hearing information that would have told me what to play next.

That doesn’t mean sparse playing is automatically better than busy playing. Charlie Parker could play torrents of notes and still sound completely musical, while Miles Davis could say an enormous amount with very few notes. The question is not how many notes are being played, but whether those notes are actually participating in the music.

There is a big difference between filling space and inhabiting space. A musician who truly feels the rhythmic space can play a lot or very little without sounding rushed, frightened, or compulsive. The amount of activity becomes a musical choice rather than a response to anxiety.

When Rhythm Feels Right

Some of the exercises I have practiced through Mike Longo’s rhythmic concepts illustrate this beautifully. For example, in my Friday Rhythm Games YouTube series, I demonstrated displaced eighth-note triplets, and the same basic principle can be applied to displaced half-note triplets, sixteenth-note triplets, and many other rhythmic relationships. On paper, an exercise like this can look extremely mathematical, but mathematics is not really what I am ultimately trying to experience.

When the displaced rhythm lands exactly where it belongs, it feels remarkably good. There is a particular sensation of relaxation to it, almost as if the rhythm is leaning back against the beat, yet it is actually quite precise. That combination of precision and relaxation is one of the most fascinating things about rhythm to me.

The more accurately the rhythm sits in its proper place, the easier it becomes to stop thinking about it. Once the relationship feels right, the music starts pulling you along rather than requiring you to push it forward. That is when thinking begins to give way to feeling.

This is another paradox that I find beautiful: precision can create freedom, accuracy can create relaxation, and discipline can create spontaneity. We normally think of discipline and freedom as opposites, but in music the discipline is often what makes freedom possible. The better the underlying rhythmic structure feels, the less attention I have to devote to controlling it.

From Thinking Music to Feeling Music

There is absolutely a time for thinking, and I would never tell a student that theory, technique, or intellectual understanding are unimportant. I have devoted enormous amounts of my life to harmony, scales, arpeggios, chord substitutions, voice leading, ear training, technique, and repertoire. I continue to study and practice those things because they expand what I am capable of hearing and expressing.

But the ultimate purpose of that knowledge is not to make me think more while I am performing. Ideally, I practice the unfamiliar until it becomes familiar, develop my ears until sounds become recognizable without conscious analysis, and repeat physical movements until my body understands them. At that point, the knowledge has become part of me rather than something I need to consciously retrieve.

Ronan has talked about practicing as a process of making the unfamiliar familiar. I think that is one of the simplest and most useful definitions of practice I have ever heard. We repeat something not because repetition is inherently virtuous, but because repeated experience gradually converts intellectual understanding into instinct.

I have also begun to think of practicing as getting the numbers to the code that unlocks the music. The numbers, exercises, scales, subdivisions, and theoretical concepts are not the music itself; they are tools that give us greater access to it. Once the code has done its job and the door opens, the point is not to stand there admiring the code but to walk through the door and play.

Eventually, the goal is not to think rhythm but to feel rhythm. The goal is not to calculate a phrase but to hear it deeply enough that its placement feels inevitable. We do all the thinking beforehand so that when the music begins, we can stop thinking and start listening.

Melody, Harmony, and Rhythm

For much of my musical life, I probably thought of melody, harmony, and rhythm as three separate categories. The deeper I go into rhythm, however, the less separate they seem. Melody is not merely a collection of pitches informed by harmony; every melodic idea is also a rhythmic shape unfolding through time.

Two musicians could theoretically play exactly the same pitches over exactly the same chord progression and produce completely different emotional effects simply because of where and how they place those pitches. One could sound stiff while the other swings, or one could sound urgent while another sounds relaxed. The notes themselves do not fully explain the difference.

This is why Charlie Parker remains so astonishing to me. His genius was not merely an expanded harmonic vocabulary, because his lines also possess an extraordinary rhythmic identity. The pitches, rhythms, accents, articulations, and spaces are inseparable parts of the musical statement.

The same is true of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, and so many other great musicians. Miles can create enormous meaning with very few notes because of where he places them, while Coltrane can generate tremendous density without necessarily sounding frantic because his rhythmic authority is so strong. Monk can place a phrase somewhere you would never expect and somehow make it sound completely inevitable.

I increasingly think of that as rhythmic virtuosity. Virtuosity should not simply mean playing fast or playing technically difficult material. True virtuosity is having enough command of your musical language to express yourself with authority, whether the result happens to contain three notes or three hundred.

Music as a Spiritual Practice

This is where music increasingly begins to resemble spiritual practice to me. Ali Akbar Khan beautifully described real music as a kind of yoga, a path toward purification and realization rather than merely wealth, honor, or mental pleasure. That perspective speaks deeply to me because it suggests that making music can itself become a form of inner work.

At the same time, I don’t think I need to think spiritual thoughts while I am actually performing. If I am improvising and simultaneously thinking about how spiritually connected I am, I am probably no longer listening very carefully to the drummer. The spirituality, at least for me, may be much simpler and more practical than that.

Be present, listen, respond, and get yourself out of the way. Stop demanding that the moment give you a particular result, and pay attention to what is actually happening instead. Those are instructions that could apply just as easily to meditation or life as they do to playing jazz.

Practicing Life Through Music

One of the things I love most about music is that it exposes me. If I am impatient, distracted, frightened, trying too hard, or desperately trying to impress somebody, all of those tendencies eventually reveal themselves in the way I play. Music gives me very immediate feedback about my internal state.

That makes practicing music a kind of laboratory for practicing life. Can I stay present when something unexpected happens, listen rather than immediately reacting, and trust the people around me enough to allow them to contribute? Can I care deeply about what I am doing without needing to control exactly how it turns out?

Those are not merely musical questions. They are the same kinds of questions that arise in relationships, work, spirituality, and almost every other meaningful part of life. In that sense, every musical performance gives me another opportunity to practice being the kind of person I would like to be.

The Professional Musician and the Spiritual Musician

There might seem to be a contradiction between all of this and the fact that I am also a professional musician. I play weddings, private parties, corporate events, restaurants, concerts, jazz gigs, blues gigs, Latin gigs, and many other kinds of performances. People hire me to do a job, so obviously certain outcomes really do matter.

If someone hires me for a wedding ceremony, I need to play the correct piece when the bride walks down the aisle. If someone hires a band for an event, we need to arrive on time, communicate professionally, bring appropriate equipment, dress appropriately, and understand what the client wants. Saying that I should not insist upon an outcome obviously does not mean that I should become careless about any of those responsibilities.

In fact, I think professionalism and preparation are what make musical freedom possible. I prepare carefully so that once the event begins, I am free to respond to what is actually happening rather than frantically trying to remember what I should be doing. Preparation is part of serving the music and serving the people who invited me to bring music into their event.

Once the preparation has been done, however, the same challenge appears again. Can I stop trying to force the performance to be great, trust the preparation, listen to the musicians around me, and respond to the actual event rather than to some imaginary perfect performance in my head? The responsibility is real, but the attempt to control every musical outcome is unnecessary.

Serving the music also means serving the context in which the music is happening. The right choice at a jazz concert may be completely different from the right choice during cocktails at a wedding, and neither is inherently more artistic or more spiritual than the other. If I am truly listening, then part of what I am listening to is the reason the music is happening in the first place.

Music can therefore serve a practical social purpose while still having tremendous depth. A couple hearing a meaningful song at their wedding, friends dancing at a party, people talking and laughing while live music surrounds them, or listeners sitting quietly during a concert can all be genuine musical experiences. The spiritual dimension does not necessarily depend upon everyone sitting silently and treating the music as sacred.

The Music Has No Agenda

Another subtle idea Ronan has discussed with me is that the music itself has no feelings. That sounds strange at first because we constantly describe music as happy, sad, angry, peaceful, exciting, or melancholy. Yet those feelings arise in us as we experience the music; the music itself simply exists as sound unfolding in time.

Igor Stravinsky expressed a similar idea when he argued that music is, by its very nature, incapable of expressing anything outside of itself. That may sound extreme because music certainly produces powerful emotions in us, but I think the distinction is important: the feelings belong to our experience of the music rather than to the music itself. The music does not have to tell us what it means or what we are supposed to feel; it simply is.

Thinking about this has made me reconsider how much emotional baggage musicians sometimes place on their own performances. The music does not require me to manufacture profundity, demonstrate how emotional I am, or prove how seriously I take it. In many cases, trying to do those things merely puts me back at the center.

My job is simpler: serve the music. I am still the person holding the guitar, making choices, and physically producing the sounds, so I don’t want to turn this into a metaphysical claim that I somehow cease to exist. What disappears, when things are going well, is not me but my preoccupation with myself.

When I am relaxed and playing at my best, the music becomes my only agenda. I am listening to it, feeling it, and responding to it rather than continuously evaluating myself. Because I am no longer spending so much mental energy worrying about how I am doing, I have far more attention available for the music itself.

Extending the Zone

I wish I could say that I always play from this place, but I certainly do not. Sometimes I am relaxed and deeply connected, while at other times I start thinking too much, judging myself, or trying to make something happen. That is precisely why I consider this a practice rather than a destination.

Perhaps musical progress does not mean eventually reaching some permanent state in which you are always completely free and inspired. Maybe progress means staying connected a little longer, noticing more quickly when you have lost that connection, and learning how to return without making a big emotional event out of it. Like so many things in life, it may be less about perfection than about returning.

My current goal is therefore to extend the amount of time I can remain in that state of relaxed attention. I want to listen more deeply, trust more completely, feel rhythm more naturally, and interfere less often. Every day of practice gives me another opportunity to strengthen that ability.

Music as a Universal Language

Many musicians and spiritual teachers have described music as a language that reaches beyond ordinary language. Hazrat Inayat Khan called music the language of the spirit, Sri Chinmoy described it as an inner or universal language, and Rumi wrote of falling into a place where everything is music. Those ideas resonate particularly strongly with me as an instrumental musician.

Instrumental music does not tell the listener exactly what to think. There are no lyrics specifying a particular story, political idea, historical moment, or emotional interpretation. The listener therefore participates in creating the meaning of the experience.

The same piece can mean completely different things to different people, or even different things to the same person at different points in life. That openness may be part of what gives instrumental music such extraordinary power. It does not explain itself; it simply offers an experience and allows us to meet it wherever we happen to be.

The Ongoing Journey

I have been playing guitar for most of my life, and one of the wonderful things about music is that the longer I do it, the larger it becomes. At one stage, improvement meant learning more chords, then it meant scales, harmony, improvisation, repertoire, technique, and ear training. All of those things continue to matter, but increasingly the questions that interest me most are different.

How deeply can I listen, how accurately can I inhabit rhythmic space, and how fully can I respond to the musicians around me? How much can I trust the work I have already done, stop trying so hard to sound good, and simply serve whatever music is happening right now? How often can I remember that the music is not about me?

Maybe that is why this feels like more than another chapter in my musical development. It feels as though many of the earlier chapters were preparing me for these questions all along. I still want to become a better guitarist, but simply becoming a better guitarist no longer seems like a large enough goal.

I want to become a better musician, which means becoming a better listener and developing a deeper relationship with rhythm, space, sound, and the people around me. Beyond even that, I want to become someone who can show up, listen deeply, feel deeply, respond honestly, and allow the music to be what it is. After all the scales, chords, rhythms, theory, gigs, recordings, and years spent holding this instrument, perhaps one of the simplest instructions I have ever received will turn out to be one of the deepest: play music, not guitar.

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If you are planning a wedding, private party, or corporate event and want to explore how live music can become part of the experience, book a free music consultation with me or simply write to me on the contact page. Live music can serve many different purposes, but at its best it creates something that cannot be completely planned in advance: a shared experience that exists only in that particular moment. That is part of what continues to make playing music so meaningful to me.