Time is the thing every other element of jazz guitar leans on. You can have great voicings, a creative ear, and a deep vocabulary of substitutions — but if your time wobbles, the soloist hears it, the rhythm section hears it, and the audience hears it (whether or not they could name what's wrong). Rhythm guitar is largely the discipline of getting time right, then making it musical.
That's the through-line of UK jazz guitarist Jamie Taylor's two MMC classes on the subject: Jazz Time Feel and Mobile Rhythm Guitar. Together they make a tight pairing for any player who wants the rhythm chair to actually swing, not just survive the changes.
What "time feel" actually is
Taylor's argument in Jazz Time Feel is that time feel is the constant uniting every great jazz player from Louis Armstrong to Kurt Rosenwinkel, but the topic is under-taught — and the standard pieces of folk wisdom ("feel can't be taught," "jazz eighth notes are really triplets") are at best oversimplifications and at worst flat wrong. The class walks through what feel actually consists of — placement, length, dynamics, the relationship between the player's beat and the rhythm section's beat — and gives you tools to work on each one.
The most useful insight for most players is that feel isn't a single skill but several stacked skills. Working on them in isolation, with a metronome and a recording device, is what actually moves the needle.
The "four-to-the-bar" tradition
Mobile Rhythm Guitar takes the four-to-the-bar style — the steady chordal pulse you hear behind soloists in Basie-era big bands and small-group swing — and asks how players like Freddie Green, Jim Hall, and Bucky Pizzarelli got that style to do so much more than mark time. Their accompaniment wasn't just keeping a beat; it was a moving counterpoint, voicings shifting around the soloist's lines while the swing never wavered.
The class focuses on practical ways to build that vocabulary: economical three-string chord shapes that leave room for the soloist, voice-leading between voicings so the inner lines move smoothly, and the small accent placements — the slight push on two and four — that distinguish a jazz pulse from a metronomic one.
Tone choices that support time
Tone matters more for rhythm playing than for solo playing, because the rhythm guitarist's sound has to sit under everything else without crowding the bass or stepping on the soloist's range. The historical model is an acoustic archtop played percussively with the bass rolled off, but the same approach translates to semi-acoustic and even solid-body guitars if you're thoughtful about EQ and right-hand attack.
Where this fits in the catalog
Jamie Taylor's full MMC catalog spans phrasing, comping, transcription, and standard repertoire from his perspective as a working UK-scene player. For someone focused on rhythm-section duties specifically, the natural sequence is:
- Jazz Time Feel first — to diagnose where your time is actually going off
- Mobile Rhythm Guitar second — to build the vocabulary that makes the time interesting
- A Guide to Practical Comping, Part II after — to extend the same vocabulary into denser comping for combo settings
Time feel is the one element of jazz playing where reading about it does the least good and isolated practice with a metronome and recordings does the most. These classes are most useful as a framework for that practice — not a shortcut around it.
