Sherborn drummer Paul Sarni's eclectic musical career has taken him from coast to coast

Drummer Paul Sarni has been playing professionally for over 40 years – with his singular blend of proficiency, precision, poise and passion – and he’s worked with an eye-popping list of performers from Boston to LA and in between.

From gospel icon Andraé Crouch and Vegas legend Wayne Newton, to distinguished singer and dancer Ben Vereen, country giant Lee Greenwood and pop megastar Tony Orlando, over the years the Dover-Sherborn High grad has worked with a slew of top-tier studio musicians, composers, arrangers and producers.

Born in Boston, Sarni spent his early years in the North End and his teens in Sherborn. He cites an eclectic range of influences – including other top-tier players with Massachusetts roots Terri Lyne Carrington, a Medford native who’s played with Dizzy Gillespie; Kenny Aronoff from Stockbridge, who was John Mellencamp’s drummer; and Joey Kramer of Aerosmith – but the drummer who inspired him most was his father, Tony Sarni, who played with the well-remembered standards/pop group Paul Broadnax and the Paul-Champ Three, formed in Cambridge in 1950.

By age 6, Paul Sarni was sitting in regularly with the Paul-Champ Three at venues like The Jazz Workshop, Paul’s Mall in Boston, Mosely’s on the Charles in Dedham, the Chateau de Ville in Framingham and the Cottage Crest in Waltham. By age 8, after getting a kit of his own, he quickly became as comfortable using brushes as he was using sticks.

In the late '70s and early '80s, while a student at Dover-Sherborn, Sarni won the Most Outstanding Musicianship Award by the National Association for Jazz Education four years in a row, and the Louis Armstrong Jazz Award upon graduation. He took private drum lessons from Alan Dawson, a Roxbury native and Berklee faculty member; Walter Tokarczyk, a Boston Pops and Boston Symphony Orchestra percussionist who lived in Natick; and Gary Chaffee, who chaired the Berklee Percussion Department and taught at the New England Conservatory of Music.

Throughout the 1980s, Sarni gigged non-stop, playing everywhere from local weddings and seedy hotel lounges to the prestigious Ryles Jazz Club in Cambridge. He joined two very popular Christian-rock bands, the Living Stones, formed in the mid-1970s in Framingham, and the David Coate Group, which the press labeled “the Christian Toto.” In the late 1980s, he partnered with renowned keyboardist and Berklee graduate Mark Adamy, and he played on a soundtrack written by Milford native Shawn Clement, who studied at Berklee. The project was produced, recorded and engineered in Rockland by Grammy Award-winner Bob St. John.

The late 1980s, during visits to Los Angeles, Sarni formed a close relationship with legendary jazz-fusion pioneer (and Chelsea native) Chick Corea and jammed frequently with members of Chick Corea Elektric Band. He had met Corea many times before at venues like the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, but he says that spending time with Corea in his own studio was a formative experience like no other.

In 1990, Sarni moved to LA and soon afterward he was playing with seven-time Grammy Award winner Andraé Crouch. He worked with Crouch until the early 2000s, and played on his mid-1990s release, "A Gospel Family Christmas." That same year, Sarni joined the C.A. Worship Band, which features all-star line-up including Latin-jazz band leader Justo Almario, bassists Jerry Watts and John Peña, keyboardist Bill Cantos and percussionist Alex Acuña. Thirty years later, Sarni continues to play with the group.

Always staying close to his New England roots, Sarni has maintained an active musical schedule on both the East and West coasts over the past three decades. He’s toured nationwide with Wayne Newton, done live shows with Ben Vereen, Lee Greenwood and Tony Orlando, and backed Las Vegas luminaries Bob Anderson and Vince Falcone. In the late 1990s, he teamed with Alex Al, Michael Jackson’s longtime bassist/keyboardist, and keyboardist/accordionist Steve Bach, currently the band director for Cirque de Soleil, and the power trio recorded a demo called "3-One.”

In 2021, Sarni was one part of a thoroughly entertaining group, The Italian Duo Featuring Sarni/Pesaturo, along with Rhode Island native and New England Conservatory graduate Corey Pesaturo, a World Accordion Championship winner who also plays saxophone, clarinet and piano. They played rousing renditions of songs by a smorgasbord of artists, from Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock to Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan.

In February, he joined a distinctly global group of Boston-based talent to play a one-off Chinese New Year concert sponsored by the American Academy of World Music. Held at the historic Henderson House in Weston, the band featured Grammy-nominated vocalist Debo Ray (née Deborah Pierre), an assistant professor at Berklee; bassist and composer Wesley Wirth, a Sherborn native and New England Conservatory graduate; guitarist David Fiuczynski, a professor at Berklee; djembe player Sidi Mohamed Joh Camara, an associate professor of dance at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee; and suona, flute and woodwinds sensation Yazhi Gou, a Berklee graduate whose traditional instrumentation was essential to the project given its Chinese New Year theme. The show was recorded and mixed by Brockton native David Karahalis, and the resulting CD will be distributed in cities across China.

Sarni is an officially sponsored artist for Yamaha drums, Vic Firth sticks, Remo heads and Zildjian cymbals, which has its worldwide headquarters in Norwell.

D.S. Monahan is a writer and editor who has explored a wide variety of topics and is a contributor to the virtual Music Museum of New England. He spent his teen years in Medway and now lives in Japan.

This article originally appeared on MetroWest Daily News: Drummer Paul Sarni of Sherborn has had an eclectic musical career