For Carlos Santana, the Woodstock spirit is as strong now as it was 55 years ago, when he and the band that bears his name played the famed festival in upstate New York.

“It’s a spiritual frequency, a spiritual event,” says Santana, who pays homage to Woodstock at every one of his concerts with film footage, crowd noises from the event and, always, a performance of “Soul Sacrifice,” the charged pyrotechnic exposition that was used in the subsequent film and helped launch the then-fledgling band into a star strata.

So it’s understandably near and dear to the guitar legend’s heart, and something he endeavors to share with his contemporary audiences.

“When you think of Jesus walking around on the mountain, passing gluten-free bred and mercury-free fish, people made Woodstock sort of like that kind of event,” Santana explains by phone from home in the San Francisco Bay Area. “It was not a commercial, Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola event. It was three days of unity, harmony, oneness to bring awareness to equality, fairness and justice. The people at Woodstock, they were hippies who believed in something different than the corrupt corporations or religions and politicians.

“We truly believed then, as we believe now, that peace is possible in our lifetime, on this planet. That’s why Woodstock is still relevant. We still need peace. Like John Lennon used to say, ‘War is over if you want it,’ but you gotta see it, you gotta visualize it.’ Peace is in your heart, not in your mind.”

That’s been a guiding principle for Santana during the past five and a half decades, through personnel shifts in his bands — which early included Journey founders Neal Schon and Gregg Rolie — and projects with other artists such as John McLaughlin and the Isley Brothers. Then there are the many guests who populated Santana’s 15-times platinum “Supernatural” album in 1989 (the winner of nine Grammy Awards) and its follow-ups “Shaman” in 2002 and “All That I Am” in 2005. Santana also loaded up on collaborators for his last album “Blessings and Miracles” in 2021.

Santana is also working on a new album, to be called “Ritual,” that will include contributions from Darryl “DMC” McDaniels and Smokey Robinson as well as, posthumously, from Miles Davis and Michael Jackson.

“With ‘Abraxas’ (in 1970) we awakened to the fact that Santana was relevant, like the Rolling Stones and Beatles and Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone,” he recalls. “It felt like Santana was a big band to reckon with. And ‘Supernatural,’ as soon as I played the last note in ‘Smooth’ it felt like it was gonna be bigger than big — I didn’t know how big it was gonna be, but I knew it was gonna have a deep impact on people, which is what you want to do, always.”

This year’s Oneness Tour adds another new friend to Santana’s universe, opening act Counting Crows. Santana says the two bands met in Europe a few years back, and while the summer tour was being lined up “I heard they were fans of (Santana) and wanted to do something with us, so we wanted to do something with them as well.” The result, he adds, is “something completely different, totally new and very familiar,” which includes not only celebrating Woodstock’s 55th anniversary but also the same for the very first Santana album, which came out just a few weeks before the festival.

“We do yesterday, today and tomorrow,” Santana says. “We get to play the first three albums, untouched and clean, and then we move on to the 70s and 80s and 90s and to where we are now.

“Y’know, since I crossed the border from Tijuana and moved up to San Francisco, everything for me is about grace and gratitude. that’s the epicenter; wherever you go, you take grace with you. So it becomes not a coincidence; it becomes a way of life. There’s not chance, fortune or luck to it. It’s grace.”

Santana and Counting Crows perform at 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 25 at the Pine Knob Music Theatre, 33 Bob Seger Drive, Independence Township. 313-471-7000 or 313Presents.com.