Practice is the Prayer
Benediction: Deep listening, deep presence, and what practice makes possible
Jazz and The Living Tradition
And then there is what the practice does to the one practicing — a dimension as old as the tradition itself and as urgent as anything the present moment demands.
John Coltrane illustrates this argument vividly because his development is so well documented and so dramatic that it functions as clear evidence as the practice changes the person in real time across his recordings.1 From the hard bop period through “A Love Supreme” to the late work “Ascension” and “Interstellar Space” you are listening to a human being transformed by his own devotion to a discipline which is not reproducible by any system that does not have a self to transform.
“A Love Supreme” is the touchstone. The suite is explicitly framed as an act of devotion, and document of spiritual arrival after a period of profound struggle. Coltrane had confronted his addiction in 1957 and described the experience as a sudden awakening and a gift of faith.2 The music that followed was the working out of that faith in sound. The practice — hours of daily work on the horn, the relentless harmonic exploration, the physical and mental discipline of what critics called “sheets of sound”3 — was not separate from the spiritual life. The horn was the altar. The practice was the prayer.
Alice Coltrane, "Lord Help Me to Be," from A Monastic Trio (Impulse! Records, 1968).
This understanding of practice as transformation rather than mere preparation runs across traditions and centuries. In the Zen archer’s discipline, the goal is not a more accurate shot. The goal is the dissolution of the boundary between the archer and the act — a state of presence so complete that the self doing the practicing and the practice itself become indistinguishable.4 In the Indian classical tradition, a student may spend years on a single raga, not to master it as a performance piece but because the sustained, devoted attention does something to the person paying it. It changes the quality of their listening, their presence, their capacity for genuine response.5 In the monastic traditions of Christianity and Islam, the daily office and the five prayers are not routines. They are a technology of continuous renewal, the repetition serving as form of being remade, each time, in the act of returning.6
Jazz practice, at its deepest, belongs to this lineage. The improviser who spends years developing their ear, their harmonic vocabulary, their rhythmic sensitivity, their “sound,” in addition to accumulating tools for performance, are training themselves to be present — genuinely, vulnerably present — to what is happening in the moment. They are developing the capacity to respond truthfully rather than react habitually. They are learning, through discipline, to follow the music somewhere they did not plan to go. That is a spiritual practice as much as a musical one, and it produces a self more capable of presence, of listening, of genuine contact with another human being, which has value that extends far beyond the bandstand.
Moreover, what the individual practice cultivates in the musician, the ensemble extends into relationship — and what is cultivated there reaches out further still.
In the jazz ensemble, listening is not passive. It is the central technical and spiritual skill. The improviser who is not listening to the bassist, to the drummer’s ride cymbal, to what the pianist just left open, to the quality of attention in the room, is not really improvising. They are performing a monologue dressed as a conversation. The music may be technically accomplished. But something essential is missing: the live wire of genuine mutual response that makes the best jazz feel less like a performance and more like a conversation you are privileged to overhear.
Coltrane’s classic quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones is the evidence.7 What those four men were doing together was so mutually interpenetrating, so continuously responsive to each moment as it arrived, that it becomes difficult to analyze any single part in isolation. Elvin Jones, asked about his approach, said he never played the same thing twice because he was always responding to what was happening around him.8 More than a technical achievement, that is a practice of radical presence and of subordinating the ego’s agenda to the truth of the shared moment.
What the ensemble practice cultivates is worth naming carefully, because it extends so far beyond the music. It cultivates the capacity to limit the ego’s agenda in favor of a shared truth. It cultivates the understanding that the silence in the note not played is a space left open for someone else, making it as meaningful as sound (sometimes moreso!). It also cultivates the trust that someone else’s idea might be better than yours, or that following is not weakness, or even that the best thing you can do right now might be to listen. It cultivates the discovery that the best outcomes emerge from genuine collaboration and from listening so carefully that the boundary between your idea and the group’s idea becomes productively unclear.
These are not musical lessons only. They are lessons in how to be in relationship with other people, how to be in a community, how to participate in something larger than yourself without disappearing into it. The musician who has spent decades in genuine ensemble practice has been changed — repeatedly, continuously — by the act of listening to other human beings and responding truthfully in real time. That cumulative change is in the music. The audience receives it without necessarily being able to name it, but they feel the difference between a musician who is truly present and one who is merely executing, and they in turn learn to embody the unspoken principles as well by virtue of being in the presence of such an authentic experience.9
And then there is what this practice offers the community that receives it.
Lisa Fischer performing "See-Line Woman" with the Metropole Orkest, conducted by Jules Buckley. Royal Albert Hall, BBC Proms 2019 — Prom 45: Mississippi Goddam: A Homage to Nina Simone.
Testimony is the act of standing before your community and saying “this is what I have lived, this is what I know to be true, this is what I need you to hear,” and it requires a self that has been somewhere. Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” is not a formally sophisticated arrangement of notes. It is a human being on fire with a truth that could not be contained. The mastery is in service of the witness, and the witness is only possible because a person with a history and a body and a stake in the outcome is in the room.10
What happens to a culture that outsources its truth-telling? The algorithmic age presses that question with new urgency, and it applies across all communities. What is lost when we stop making art from lived experience and start generating it from pattern recognition? What is lost when the music no longer comes from someone who has something to say and knows why it needs to be said? AI-generated music can replicate the patterns of depth. It will soon be able to analyze the formal structures of everything Nina Simone ever recorded and produce something that bears a convincing resemblance to the surface of her work. It can reflect a culture back to itself. It cannot be responsible to that culture in any meaningful sense. It has not lived anything. It has no community to which it is accountable.11
The Art That Serves the People
The through line of this essay stretches across centuries and continents, arriving, always, at the same place.
Shakespeare writing for the masses. The griot in the village carrying the community’s memory in song. The brass band turning from the grave back toward the living. Coltrane alone with his horn in the early morning, practicing not toward a performance but toward a self. Four musicians in a room so completely present to each other that the music they make together could not have been planned. Nina Simone at the piano naming what could not be named. The Dirty Dozen in the street, playing music sophisticated enough for the academy and rooted enough for the second line. The little girl on a pew in a church full of ancestral echoes. All of it the same impulse — the impulse to make something serious and alive and true and give it to the people who need it.
The Western fine art framework is one model for understanding what serious art is and does. It has produced remarkable work, but it was never the only model, and jazz was never native to it. Jazz came from a tradition — African, communal, participatory, accountable — that held a fundamentally different understanding of what the music is for. The institutionalization of jazz brought it recognition and preservation and formal study, and those things have value, but the frame fit imperfectly, and the cost of that has been borne most heavily by the communities the music came from.
The remedy is not to abandon rigor. The artists in this lineage are rigorous. They have paid their dues technically, formally, intellectually, spiritually. Coltrane’s devotion was total. Nina’s precision was real. The Dirty Dozen’s musicianship is exacting. The remedy is to remember what the rigor is for. Mastery in service of the community. Sophistication in service of truth. Practice in service of a more fully realized self — one more capable of presence, of listening, of genuine contact with the people in the room.
The living tradition offers three things that no institution and no algorithm can replace: The community receives truth told by someone who has lived it and is accountable to them; the practitioner is transformed by the discipline of their devotion — brought closer, through years of practice, to something essential in themselves that the performance then carries into the room; the ensemble models a way of being together — listening, responsive, present, changed by what it hears — that does not stay on the stage. It goes out into the world both with the musicians who practiced it and the audiences who received it.
In a moment when so much of what we hear is being generated by systems that have never lived a day, never lost anyone, never stood in a room and felt the weight of what needed to be said, that offering matters more than ever. The question is not whether a music is serious enough for the concert hall. The question is whether the concert hall — or the academy, or the institution, or the algorithm — is alive enough for a form that has survived bondage, appropriation, canonization, and commodification, a music that stands as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, and to the enduring power of the truths we find when we seek them together.
Read the Full Series:
Pt. 1 - Prelude: Coltrane and the Heart Sutra
Pt. 2 - The Sound that Knew Its Meaning
Pt. 3 - Music and the Measuring Stick
Pt. 4 - Music that Remembers
Pt. 5 - Benediction: Practice is the Prayer
On Coltrane’s development across his recordings, see Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); and Ashley Kahn, A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album (New York: Viking, 2002).
Coltrane’s account of his 1957 spiritual awakening appears in his liner notes to A Love Supreme (Impulse! Records, 1964). See also Porter, John Coltrane, chapter 6.
Ira Gitler’s phrase “sheets of sound” appeared in a 1958 Downbeat review. See Kahn, A Love Supreme, 28.
Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery, trans. R.F.C. Hull (New York: Pantheon, 1953).
On the raga as social and spiritual act, see Ravi Shankar, My Music, My Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968); and Daniel M. Neuman, The Life of Music in North India (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980).
On the monastic daily office as spiritual practice, see Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953); on the five daily prayers in Islamic practice, see Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Spirituality: Foundations (New York: Crossroad, 1987).
On the Coltrane classic quartet’s collective approach, see Porter, John Coltrane, chapters 8–9; and Kahn, A Love Supreme, passim.
Elvin Jones’s statement about never playing the same thing twice is discussed in Ted Panken’s interviews with Jones archived at WKCR-FM, Columbia University; and in Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 88.
On deep listening as both musical practice and broader human capacity, see Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (New York: iUniverse, 2005); and David Borgo, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (New York: Continuum, 2005).
“Mississippi Goddam” appears on Nina Simone, Nina Simone in Concert (Philips Records, 1964). See also Simone, I Put a Spell on You (cited in Part III, note 1), 89–90.
On the limitations of AI-generated music with respect to human experience and accountability, see Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).