One feels all sorts of different things when making music. Calm, love, anger, sorrow, solidarity with one's fellow peers, and etc.
One of the more salient experiences for me is this musical play that can be seen as a dance with death, so to speak. One dances along a point of high tension, like dancing along a tight-rope, attempting greater and greater feats in defiance of gravity and physical and psychological limitations.
One of the truly great forms of soloing takes on this form. You get this rapid fire of ferocious notes that all dance along the beats of the drum, the entire line pulled tight with the anticipation that failure such as a skipped note disrupts the mood enough to figure as catastrophe.
It all comes at the risk of social death in this case. One makes a mistake at such a heightened moment and one falls to destruction in the eyes of one's peers.
These death games show up in many expressive forms throughout many cultures. Part of sublime experience consists of being on the verge of death - or at least simulating it - staring it in the face while demonstrating the maximum level of control of one's own expression, pushing equilibrium to the tipping point by performing increasingly ornate and skillful feats, thereby increasing the levels of concentration needed to maintain control. The concept of flow comes to mind here too: one is master over sights, sounds, touch, etc. in the face of death. All this is better when the music is loud and hot.
We like to get our little hearts beating. That's for sure.
One can take the implied cruelty out of this activity with the understanding that there are those around us - our bandmates, friends, communities, whatever - that can catch us if we do happen to fall.
