'We Kept The Music Going': Bernard Purdie On Drumming For Aretha And More

'Bernard "Pretty" Purdie is on the shortlist of the hardest-working drummers in the history of recorded music. The list of artists he's worked with, on the other hand, is quite long: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Lloyd Price, James Brown, Steely Dan — on and on stretching back to 1962. On many of those recordings, you can hear a triplet rhythm that's come to be known as the Purdie Shuffle. Purdie's latest album, his first in nearly a decade, is called Cool Down. Speaking with NPR 's Lulu Garcia Navarro, he says that although he's been honing his craft since he was a child, at least one of the iconic grooves of his career happened by accident — when a piece of sheet music slid out of place at a session with Aretha Franklin.'