Stewart Copeland once joked that he is always minding his own business when his peace is suddenly broken by an excitable fan who approaches him and proclaims, ‘You’re my second favorite drummer of all time’. The first, he says, is always Neil Peart. Fans of Copeland are not alone on this front; Dave Grohl called Peart a different “species of drummer”, and Lars Ulrich said he wasn’t “qualified” to play Rush fills.

However, perhaps the most remarkable facet of Peart’s musicianship was that he wasn’t just ‘the drummer’; he also wrote songs that brought his kit into the fore and away from the realm of beat-keeping background. This gave the Canadian bookworm perhaps the best vantage point to assess the full scope of drumming and those who maximized its potential. Thus, when Peart names the greatest, you’ve got to believe him.

For the revered Rush icon, one fellow drummer stood out from the rest of the pack. Back in 2017, three years before his tragic passing, Peart named the jazz legend Buddy Rich as the greatest drummer of all time. The modest musician didn’t just put his own word forward on the matter, he cited another of his fellow heroes on the matter. Peart quoted Gene Krupa, the man he called “perhaps the only other candidate” for the best drummer ever, who once said that Rich was “the greatest drummer ever to have drawn breath”.

In fact, Krupa took matters even further and placed his peer in a league of his own, stating: “There are all the great drummers in the world—and then there’s Buddy”. This great appraisal of Rich’s work is widely regarded. He was a natural sticksmith who was raised in a show business family and apparently started hitting a kit when he wasn’t even two years old, which adds a great deal of nurture to the mix, too. But beyond that, Peart thought he was the complete drumming package.

“It’s not just Buddy’s natural musicality, soloist’s instinct, and the ears of a dancer,” he told Music Radar. “He had those, all right, but chief among his gifts was those hands”. Peart even clarified this by adding: “It’s not ‘fan talk’, because I never really was a Buddy Rich ‘fan’.” Nevertheless, he thought that researching him was a rite of passage if he was going to treat drumming as his studied profession and explained that he had “done more research than most anyone on Buddy and his musical life”.

Along the way, Peart was even invited to imitate him somewhat for tribute shows over the years and in doing so he got to inhabit the mind and hands of Rich and found the mix incomprehensible. “Buddy was truly the master of everything,” he said. There was a sense of intent about every stroke that seemed like a painter rattling off a masterpiece in real time.

As Peart concluded: “Yes, there are plenty of people who can swing and rock those sticks, no question – but here we have a blend of a great gift, a life devoted unstintingly to its perfection, and audiences to appreciate it along the way.”

So, while Keith Richards might have criticized John Bonham for being too thundering, Ginger Baker draws asterisks to his esteem by being too difficult in every which way, and the humble Copeland falls short simply for not being Peart, Rich triumphs through lack of any real weakness.

Who was Buddy Rich?

As Peart hinted, a great deal of this was also due to Rich’s unrivalled amount of practice. He was born in New York in 1917 and raised by two parents who were part of a vaudeville act.

When he was only two, they had incorporated their freakishly talented kid into their routine. This imbued him with a sense of showmanship and dedication to the arts at an unfathomable age. However, there was little place for play in his life. Thus, he would sneak into the orchestra pit whenever he could and approach the instrument that seemed most natural to him: the drums.

In his teenage years, he became a child star. He sang, danced, and, of course, played the drums. This gave him a holistic understanding of percussion and its place in music that few, quite literally, in human history could compete with. So, by the time he was 20, and it was clear that jazz was his true love, he decided to make it his mission to create sweet music and, in turn, that would cement him as the greatest jazz drummer around. Vitally, he took this approach rather than the other way around. In the end, he surpassed that achievement, becoming the greatest drummer in history.

So, who was Rich’s favourite drummer? Well, it is a mark of his truly considered approach to the kit and forward-think, clear-eyed ways that he shunned all the showy big hitters that followed in the world of rock ‘n’ roll, and once said: “Karen Carpenter, do you know you’re one of my favourite drummers?” He was reluctant to praise elsewhere, so we don’t know where that ‘one of’ ranks her; it certainly showcases Rich’s eye for the details and ‘drumming for the song’ sentiment.

Listen to him nail a spectacular performance of ‘The Beat Goes On’ with his daughter, who is described as “12 and a half years old” and “drunk” below.