Practice This!
October 2008

Saxophonist and composer Dave Anderson plays on the Seattle scene with the Dave Anderson Quartet, Trio Real, JBDA duo and several other groups. In this installment of Practice This! Anderson discusses how to improve your feel for time by practicing layers of time. For more information about Anderson’s projects visit www.daveandersonjazz.com.

Have you noticed that many of the great jazz players have an amazing feel for time in their playing – regardless of tempo – and some seem to be able to change time feel at any moment without losing their sense of “swing”? Two excellent examples of this are the solos of Herbie Hancock on “There is No Greater Love” from Miles Davis’ Four & More, and Cannonball Adderley on “Corcovado” from Cannonball’s Bossa Nova. Herbie switches time feel for large sections of the tune, and Cannonball abruptly shifts the feel from phrase to phrase. You could say that they’re both playing multiple “layers of time.”

We can improve our time feel, our double-timing, and the rhythmic variety of our solos by practicing layers of time. One helpful approach is to systematically vary the rhythmic basis of improvisation between: A) quarter note triplets, B) eighth notes, C) eighth note triplets and D) sixteenth notes. Find practice material or play-along tracks with two, four or eight-bar phrases in similar harmony at moderate tempos, and practice an “acceleration” exercise, starting with the slowest rhythmic basis (quarter note triplets) and then changing it from A > B > C > D. Start with quarter notes if sixteenth notes are too fast. Focus less on note choices and more on playing with a good time feel (and remember that swing feel is triplet based). Once the sixteenth notes, aka “double-timing” start to feel and sound solid – this could take a while – then change to a “deceleration” exercise that starts with sixteenth notes and then slows down, D > C > B > A. Try variations (A>C>B>D or D>B>C>A) or experiment with advanced applications, like drawing a matrix of rhythms vs. harmonies and improvising off of that. The most important thing is not to find extreme applications, but to play the simple exercises well and “in-the-pocket”.

One easy way for you to try this approach is over a slow, standard twelve-bar blues. In the first four bars, play mainly quarter note triplets. For the second four bars, play mainly eighth notes (note the harmony is changing more than every four bars). Finally, during the last four bars of the chorus (the “turnaround”), play mainly eighth note triplets. On the second chorus, for the first four bars play sixteenth notes, then reverse the sequence: four bars of eighth note triplets followed by four bars of eighth notes. In just two choruses, you have practiced accelerating and decelerating through four “layers of time,” and have actually simulated for your body the feeling of playing the chord changes at four different tempos.

Once you’ve learned a practice approach to this, revisit it for as little as five or ten minutes each day, and you will be surprised how quickly it affects the content and shape of your solos.