With a bunch of friends, we once got the chance to speak to the guitarist for quite a while at the end of a concert he gave at the Regattabar in Cambridge, MA. He told us he used to lock himself up in a practice room at Berklee and shed improvising over one single chord for hours!! That way, he would really get into the sound of the chord scale from which the chord derived.
I'm bringing up this anecdote because I've found it efficient to work like that myself, and to share this tip with my jazz students. It's really easy (and worthwhile!) to program a single-chord loop in GarageBand or Band-in-a-Box to play over... Experiment with all sorts of phrases and motifs, covering the whole range of your instrument, using wide and narrow intervals, etc... As long as all the notes you play belong to the chord scale you decide to work on.
A student once told me he would have thought such practice wouldn't result in getting anywhere... The exact opposite is true: before you start connecting one chord to the next, you need to have deeply assimilated what notes to play on each chord.
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