Jack DeJohnette once explained his very sophisticated broken-time approach to me by using an analogy from a laundromat. He called his concept “washing machine time” and told me to visualize it like this: in a laundromat the washers and dryers have windows through which you can see the moving clothes. This motion is caused by the clothes being moved by the regular rotation of the machine’s inner chamber, but the clothes never fall to the bottom of the chamber at the same point in the rotation. One time the clothes will be carried 1/4 of a revolution, then they will fall to the bottom. Another time they may travel 5/8s of the way around before they drop. Another time they could travel completely around without gravity pulling the clothes to the bottom. Jack told me that the fixed rate of the rotation of the machine, in real time (seconds), was analogous to the fixed duration of a musical phrase; i.e., one measure or four measures or eight measures, etc., and that he can feel “musical time” in terms of seconds, --not just in terms of counting a certain number of beats per phrase. His ideas can fall anywhere in a phrase, just as laundry can fall at any point in the machine’s rotation, without disrupting the musical flow.

--John Riley, Beyond Bop Drumming