Bernard Purdie  

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"Bernard Purdie is best-known in rare groove circles for his "Funky Donkey", for playing on Gabor Szabo's Jazz Raga and for composing the soundtrack for the blaxploitation flick Lialeh."--Sholem Stein

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Bernard "Pretty" Purdie (born June 11, 1939) is a session drummer from Maryland, United States, who claims to be the most recorded drummer in history, working on over 3000 albums. Purdie is considered an influential soul/funk drummer. He is credited as being one of the inventors of the "Acid Jazz" genre in music. According to Drummerworld.com, "colleagues describe the drummer's style as the 'funkiest soul beat' in the business".

Starting in the 1970s, Purdie began making claims that Beatles manager Brian Epstein enlisted him to overdub drum parts on 21 of "the first three" Beatles recordings. Purdie has also claimed, as reproduced in Max Weinberg's 1984 book The Big Beat, that "Ringo never played on anything...not the early stuff." This claim has never been substantiated by any outside sources, at least in regard to his replacement of Starr drum parts on Beatles records of 1962 through 1964, which would roughly be the time covered by the first three Beatles albums, depending on whether they are reckoned by the British or American releases. Those who know the recordings best, including of course Starr himself, have always identified Starr as the drummer on all Beatles records. There are well-documented exceptions when Ringo had been unavailable, as on the April 14, 1969 session for "The Ballad of John and Yoko" where Paul McCartney handles the drumming duties in Starr's absence, or on the one and only time that he had been replaced, by session drummer Andy White for the band's third visit to Abbey Road Studios on September 11, 1962. Purdie's claim is also not helped by the fact that whereas Epstein handled business decisions, his musical initiatives were always rebuffed by the band, Epstein therefore hardly likely to interfere with the province of producer George Martin and the Beatles themselves for fear of backlash.

Some have speculated that Purdie was the drummer hired by Atlantic Records to overdub the drumming of Pete Best on several tracks that the Beatles had recorded circa 1961 for Polydor in Hamburg as back-up band for singer Tony Sheridan. Polydor made these tracks available once the Beatles had achieved fame. Atlantic felt the need to add drumming overdubs on three tracks: Ain't She Sweet, Take Out Some Insurance on Me Baby, and Sweet Georgia Brown. Atlantic also added guitar overdubs to Take Out Some Insurance and Sweet Georgia Brown. In the case of the latter, the guitar was added on top of John Lennon and George Harrison. The reasons for Atlantic overdubbing these instruments have never been explained.


An incomplete list of other artists he has recorded for or with:



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