Here are a couple of exercises from my Drum Channel course, Introduction to Jazz. There are many different ways to play jazz, just as there are for playing rock, Dixieland, songo, samba, or reggae. One of the things I built my career on is playing many different styles of music.
Right now ,we are going to talk about something called, spang-spang-a-lang—the international jazz terminology that drummers know all over the world. Whether they are speaking Japanese, Korean, German, or Spanish, they will know what spang-spang-a-lang means. It’s basically a quarter note and a triplet with the middle-triplet note missing. In my opinion, this is the starting point for learning to play jazz.