A little fill

This was a little idea I heard at a gig. It is a nice subtle embellishment of the comping figure in Jazz Time using a drag onto the “and”, in this case, of beat 3 and works nicely at a medium to slow tempo.

Fig.1 is the basic idea. Fig.2 is the most useful way to understand and practice it. Fig.3 shows two other ways to think of it that will work at faster tempos. Just make sure you don’t slip into dragging onto the downbeat, which is easy to do.

Once you get the idea, experiment with moving it around the kit in different ways - playing it on the toms, splitting the hands between two drums etc.

This was originally posted on "Jazz Drumming Blog" and in the "Ideas for Jazz Drumming" e-book (no longer available).