What time is it? Why, it’s time for another 70s funk drum break: “Heavy Soul Slinger,” written by Horace Ott for Bernard Purdie and his 1972 album Soul Is… Pretty Purdie.*
Bernard Purdie has such an incomprehensibly large discography that I feel like a lot of people simply stumble into any one particular recording of his. I found this tune years ago from a post on a now-shuttered blog about RJD2’s “A Beautiful Mine,” known to many as the Mad Men theme. The drums don’t sound programmed, but I can’t find a credited drummer for that track. Comments on the post claim that the drums were sampled from “Heavy Soul Slinger,” while these claims are repeated elsewhere, I can’t find any hard evidence to support them.
The playing and timbres of the drums are similar, but I don’t hear many licks from the Mad Men transcription in “Heavy Soul Slinger.” You can hear the off-beat hi-hat barks, but it’s not clear where the simple 8th note groove that ends the theme comes from. Although I couldn’t find any answers, it’s still fun to have been steered towards a quintessential Purdie performance.
I have the two minutes of “Heavy Soul Slinger” transcribed, including the intro, two passes through the head, and a 16-bar drum break. I transcribed the drum break back in April of 2020 (perhaps making it the last thing I transcribed as a college student), and I have no idea why I shelved it until now. I went ahead and added the first 80 seconds of the tune.
With what a punchline the Purdie Shuffle is, it’s easy to shortchange Bernard Purdie’s vocabulary. There is a lot of busy 70s funk drumming here — nimble tom work, lots of dynamics, a lot of coordination, and extended strokes on both hands (septuple being the longest).
Crashes don’t sound like they’re used at all; like a lot of R&B‑adjacent drumming, open hi-hats and ride crashes are used instead (the latter I notated with tenuto marks). Some 32nd note drags and five-stroke “ruffs” are slipped in here and there, including a bit of a messy one I have notated with grace notes in measure 51 of the drum solo:
You can see from the above that the drum solo also has some doubles split between the snare and rack tom. These toms notes are played gingerly, but not enough to be a ghost note. It’s funny how I just talked about the limits of drum notation, and I find myself butting up against them somewhat with this song.† Too much detail can be counterproductive, especially since this isn’t my own performance, so there is inherent guesswork. Striking the balance is often tough.
It sounds like Purdie might be stomping out hi-hat pedal 8ths during some of the fills, but it’s not very consistent, and I can’t tell if I’m actually hearing the hi-hat pedal or just snare buzz — there’s some classic 70s saturation on the record that mangles the timbres a bit. So, per usual, I ignored it to protect what little sanity I have left.
* ^ It seems like the album was published under the artist name “Pretty Purdie,” and not Bernard’s full name.
† ^ Speaking of notation, I apologize if the ghost notes look funny — as I mentioned in that article from the other week, the latest MuseScore update botched ghost notes, and while I tried to make sure they all look good in this transcription, I may have missed some. I’m not looking forward to dealing with this on a bigger project, but I might have to accept that there’s only so much I can do, and that it’s ultimately MuseScore’s fault if my scores look bad.
