Legendary Drummer Bernard Purdie is Selling His Personal Record Collection

Purdie is partnering with Rappcats to offer fans handpicked selections from his vinyl collection for a limited time.

Legendary session drummer, Bernard Purdie, will be selling off pieces of his expansive record collection this month.

Announced today by Rappcats and NowAgain Records chief, Egon Alapatt, with a clip of Quasimoto onlooking as the drummer gleefully runs through his trademark “Purdie Shuffle” (see below,) the sale will feature records culled from the drummer’s personal archive, mostly comprising albums he played on with or (in many cases) without credit.

“I mainly collected records I played on, and people used to sign them for me. Any time there’s a note on those records, like Quincy Jones’ records, it’s an indication that I’m on it,” Purdie tells Rappcats about the collection. “It’s cool for me to sell these as I already made my, you know, peace with myself. And knowing that I’m on over 4,000 albums, I don’t worry about fighting with anyone. It doesn’t matter to me now. But I do like to tell the truth. The legacy is out there. they can’t take it away from me now,” the drummer adds.

The records are batched into three different “bags.” For $80, fans can grab a pair of albums Purdie contributed to, packaged with a three-page letter from the drummer that serves as a primer on his career of supporting some of the most revered artists of the last 50 years. The $40 bag consists of at least one album the drummer played and the $20 bargain bag features two randomly picked albums Purdie found to be of interest for one reason or another.

You can head over to Rappcats today to secure your bag of preference and learn more about the collection.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

It’s finally here – Bernard “Pretty” Purdie’s record collection, an online sale at Rappcats. Link in my stories. The records Bernard played on – by the likes of Galt MacDermot, Steely Dan, Miles Davis, King Curtis and Aretha Franklin could fill a library. And that’s what we’re offering in this unusual record sale: Purdie’s own library of records, most of which he has played on himself. “The World’s Most Recorded Drummer” is a title bestowed or claimed by an elite few – Purdie, Hal Blaine, Earl Palmer, John JR Robinson, Jim Keltner. We may never know who truly owns that title, but there is only one of this elite heavyweight crew who can claim their own drum pattern: a funky little miracle of syncopation known as the Purdie Shuffle, which Purdie performs on Steely Dan’s “Home at Last” (from ‘Aja,’ 1977). These are the last records from Bernard Purdie’s own collection, vinyl rescued by myself and Joel Stones (@tropicaliainfurs) from a flood in the basement of his New Jersey home. This was supposed to be an in-person sale that we hosted in New York. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic we could not host this sale on the East Coast, and in the presence of the legend himself. So we shipped all of the records to Rappcats HQ in Los Angeles, I went through them all and, with Bernard’s input, assembled them into three categories for purchase. Bernard told me this regarding the record sale: ‘I mainly collected records I played on, and people used to sign them for me. Any time there’s a note on those records, like Quincy Jones’ records, it’s an indication that I’m on it … It’s cool for me to sell these as I already made my, you know, peace with myself. And knowing that I’m on over 4000 albums, I don’t worry about fighting with anyone. It doesn’t matter to me now. But I do like to tell the truth. The legacy is out there. they can’t take it away from me now. The point is, yes, all of these records, on all of these different folks – well, it’s there. I have my diaries for 50 years, of all of the different people I worked for. And I have no problems!’

A post shared by Egon (@nowagain) on Oct 14, 2020 at 11:18am PDT