You’ve seen Larnell Lewis in that ‘Enter Sandman’ video — now you can see him at the Toronto Jazz Festival

If you start looking up drumming videos on YouTube, it’s likely that before long, the algorithm will suggest “Larnell Lewis Hears ‘Enter Sandman’ for the First Time.” With a view count somewhere north of 13 million, the video shows a mild-mannered, bespectacled GTA drummer revealing his superpower: he can listen to a song once and then absolutely nail it in performance.

Even taking on radically different styles is not an issue. Lewis is hardly a metal drummer — which probably explains why he’d never heard the early-’90s Metallica megahit prior to recording the video. Lewis is a mainstay with the muscular, eclectic U.S. jazz fusion collective Snarky Puppy, with whom he just won his fourth Grammy Award this year: Best Contemporary Instrumental Album for the sprawling “Empire Central.”

He honed his skills in a high-pressure environment: church.

“My dad being musical director, I would sit on his lap and play the drums in a service when I was about three,” said Lewis over Zoom from his Oshawa home. “I was too small to reach the pedals.”

By age four, he was occasionally called on to back up the choir at the Pentecostal Church of God in Malton. Then, by age six or so, Lewis, as a full-fledged band member, would be expected to play hymns that were completely new to him practically as soon as the choir started singing them. He recalled: “You got one verse and the one chorus to figure out: What key are they in? What’s the style of music you want to put under this? What are the chord changes? What’s the bass line? And if you don’t start playing once they finish that chorus, they give you a really bad look.”

This trial by holy fire also forged the skills of Larnell’s brother, Ricky Lewis, longtime drummer for The Weeknd.

Larnell’s own big break came back in 2011 when he was playing the same night as Snarky Puppy at Toronto’s Rex Hotel. Bandleader and bassist Michael League invited him to sit in on a tune after briefly running him through the form. So well did he fit into the collective’s “family” that he was soon asked to sub in for the occasional gig. By October 2013, he was in the Netherlands recording an album with them live, in front of a studio audience, the day after learning the tunes from demo versions on the flight over.

Videos of the session show him underpinning the convoluted tunes with authoritative grooves and the occasional thunderous solo, smiling throughout.

Lewis ended up touring extensively with Snarky Puppy, as well as releasing two albums under his own name; playing gigs with his wife, steel-pan player Joy Lapps; and accompanying high-profile acts. In London, England, Lewis backstopped legendary producer Quincy Jones for a retrospective show involving everything from the big-band era to Michael Jackson; to get the sounds just right, he played a kit with electronic triggers, pads and four snare drums.

When gigs dried up due to COVID-19, he threw his energy online. Lewis recorded the “Enter Sandman” video in early 2021 for the B.C. drumming education platform Drumeo.

His performance might not have been perfect — “There were so many details that I missed,” said the self-deprecating Lewis. “One of them was a massive shot that happens once the core song has finished. Then I completely forgot there’s a fadeout.”

Nonetheless, the notoriously difficult-to-please metal community banged their heads in appreciation (see, for instance, “Metal Drummer reacts to Larnell Lewis hearing ‘Enter Sandman’ for the first time,” 2.3 million views). Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich conveyed his own regards (via his drum tech).

The video’s wide reach has also extended Lewis’s range of gigs, both as a player and an educator. For Wired, he recently recorded “13 Levels of Drumming: Easy to Complex” (1.6 million views), building magisterial, whirlwind riffs from the foundation of a super simple beat.

At the Toronto Jazz Festival, Lewis will play with Lapps’ band and the couple will lead a late-night jam session, during which they’ll play with musicians who are new to them: “It’s like being in a conversation with someone that you’re sitting beside on the airplane … You both stay open with pitching ideas and throwing in stuff, and just not shutting the conversation down until maybe somebody feels tired.”

Snarky Puppy will play the festival, too, and while Lewis technically isn’t on the gig — his Humber College teaching duties kept him from joining the current tour — he’s ruling nothing out: “I might just happen to wander onstage and just kind of … ‘Hey what are you guys doing here?’”

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