Buddha-calm and Buddha-bellied, Bernard Purdie sat alone at a huge conference table in the green room of the Clef Club in downtown Philadelphia. At 74, even with sharp white sideburns, Purdie looks youthful: His impish smile is all broad cheeks and squinting eyes, like a little boy turning on the charm when Mom walks in angry. The showmanship extends to his fashion choices, which that day included cowboy boots, a gold watch, a grape-sized pinkie ring, and a silver chain that peeked out from the collar of a jaggedly striped multicolored sweater.
But look past the gleam and he has the presence of a mountain. Nothing rushes him. He unwrapped a massive sausage and green pepper hoagie with the same unhurried precision that defined his work as the most prolific drummer of the 20th century.
“I’m on over 4,000 albums,” he said, a claim he’s made often in interviews. It would be nearly impossible to fact-check, though no one has ever disputed it. “I never looked at any one of them as, ‘Oh that’s a great opportunity.’ It’s a freaking job. I got paid to do my job.”
You have heard Bernard Purdie play drums. He has made you dance. This isn’t about musical taste — it’s just math. “What a Wonderful World.” “Rock Steady.” “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.” And those are just a few of his better-known, uncontested credits. In his heyday, the early ’60s through the ’70s, he was punctual, nailed songs on the first take, worked for hours on end, and played with inspiring energy and perfect, metronomic time. Producers loved him. They called him “Pretty.” Bernard “Pretty” Purdie. You have heard him play drums.
But once the pop industry began to move away from the session-musician business model in the ’80s, Purdie diversified. He teaches private lessons, holds clinics at recording industry events, and regularly travels overseas where he’s heralded as royalty by funk and hip-hop heads. His summer schedule included a Steely Dan tribute in a New Orleans club, a Russian breakdancing competition where he’d serve as a judge and accompanist, and the upstairs bar of a tiny Italian restaurant near Asbury Park, with plenty of others in between. His Philly audience, typical these days, would consist largely of fellow musicians, drummers especially. Many of them would buy Pretty Purdie T-shirts and the autobiography Let the Drums Speak!, which he published in 2014. A crowdsourced documentary about his life, made with his excited participation, is in production as well. The gig coincided with his most recent appearance on the cover of Modern Drummer, the biggest percussionists’ magazine in the world, where a worshipful profile found him dispensing wisdom about finding the groove and smiling while you play.
These are just the latest achievements in a 50-year career of expert self-promotion, another area where Purdie broke ground as a session man. Back when he recorded his first tracks, studio musicians weren’t appreciated or even known by name outside the record industry. But Purdie was one of the foremost sidemen to advocate for his own visibility, and few others had his charisma or cockiness. Everywhere he goes, Purdie is called upon to play his defining creation, the Purdie Shuffle, a notoriously complex four-limb beat that he invented (and quickly named after himself) in his salad days.
It has since become a rite of passage for every aspiring drummer, pilfered even by John Bonham for Led Zeppelin’s “Fool in the Rain.” Well before individuals, let alone backup musicians, practiced “branding,” Purdie had mastered it. In the time of 20 Feet From Stardom, Searching for Sugar Man, and Muscle Shoals, he’s well-positioned to be the latest hero of our culture’s habit for belatedly celebrating its unsung musical legends.
For now, he’s ably cultivating a legend even though his Top 40 days are long past. In Philadelphia, decades after he kept the busiest schedule of any drummer in Manhattan, that night’s ticket bore his name: Bernard Purdie and Friends, one of a few small combos he regularly performs with now.
“It’s taken a lot of years,” he said, “but people are finally starting to come see me for my own thing.”
Elias Williams for BuzzFeed News
Downstairs, in the steeply angled 200-seat theater, the Friends were setting up onstage. Miho Nobuzane, a waifish young Japanese woman, ran scales and checked her charts as a sound man clipped a microphone to the inside of her