So far, every jazz pattern in this curriculum has STATED the ride pattern — every quarter and every skip note in their place, the pulse explicit. Broken time is the next move: the ride pattern fragments, leaves space, and is implied rather than stated. The pulse is still there — the bassist and the hat-foot keep it — but the ride no longer plays it on every beat.
Broken time is what most modern jazz drummers do most of the time. Brian Blade, Bill Stewart, Eric Harland, Marcus Gilmore — when they're not doing something more elaborate, they're playing broken time. It's the contemporary default, the way medium swing was the default in 1960. If you understand it, you understand modern jazz drumming; if you can't do it, your playing will sound dated regardless of how clean your technique is.
The Logic of Implication
If the ride pattern is the explicit statement of jazz time, broken time is what happens when you start removing parts of that statement. Pull out the quarter on beat 2 — but the hat-foot still hits beat 2, so the listener still feels beat 2. Pull out the quarter on beat 3 — same logic. Now your ride is only playing the skip-notes (the swung 8ths), and the time is still completely intact because the bass and the hat-foot are holding it.
This is harder than it sounds, because removing notes from a memorised pattern goes against years of muscle memory. The exercises below build the skill incrementally: first remove one note, then two, then everything but the skip-notes. The hat-foot on 2 and 4 stays constant the entire time — it's the anchor that makes the implication possible.