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.
Exercises
Standard ride pattern with the quarter on beat 3 REMOVED — a visible rest in its place. (The notation puts the rest after the first ding-a, where beat 3 would normally be.) The hat-foot still lands on beats 2 and 4, so the listener feels both backbeats. The MISSING ride note creates a small hole in the pattern that the rest of the texture has to fill. This is the simplest broken-time move: ride pattern minus one quarter.
Both downbeat quarters removed. The ride is now only playing the swung skip-notes — pairs of 8ths where the second is the late one. The hat-foot is the only thing on beats 2 and 4; nothing is on beats 1 and 3 from the drummer at all. (The bassist would be walking through every beat.) The challenge: the ride pattern's identity comes from the quarter+skip alternation; removing the quarters leaves something that doesn't sound like a ride pattern at all. Trust the foot. Loop until the time feels solid even with most of the explicit beats gone.
Same skeleton as Exercise 2 — at this point the ride is playing only the & of 1 + 2 (a swung 8th pair) and the & of 3 + 4 (another). The quarters on 1 and 3 are gone; the quarters on 2 and 4 are also gone (they collapsed into the start of each 8th-pair, which is on the beat). The result is a stuttered, off-balance feel that's the bedrock of broken-time playing. The hat-foot on 2 and 4 is what keeps the listener oriented.
Two bars: bar 1 is broken time — the ride enters only on the & of 1, then a snare hit on the & of 2, then nothing else from the hands until bar 2. Imagine the soloist is playing a long-held note across bar 1; the drummer has stopped stating the time and is just acknowledging the soloist with a couple of small hits. Bar 2 returns to the full ride pattern — the soloist has moved on, the time-feel is restated. This bar-1-empty / bar-2-full alternation is the conversational logic of broken time: the drummer comments only when there's something to comment on.