I was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1946. I started playing on pots and pans in the kitchen pantry. This was a great place to begin, among all the wonderful smells of my mothers Italian cooking. My parents, Edwin Kaufman and Elizabeth Daniello Kaufman, saved the cookingware and bought me a practice pad. They also got me my first drum teacher, Jimmy Stavris. Jimmy used to come to our house once a week and give me my lesson. After the lesson my mother would give Jimmy a cup of coffee, some chocolate chip cookies, and ask how the lesson went. This went on for many years until I finished school. I continued to play drums through school, always coming home to practice and play along with records. I loved to play along with Monk records--the melodies made so much sense to me.

I was in the army band for a while where I met some great musicians. I went to Berklee, where I studied with Fred Buda and Alan Dawson. In or around 1969 I met Jerry Bergonzi and we started playing together, many hours of duo playing which we still do today. I started teaching for Arthur Press of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a studio house. Some of the other teachers who taught there included John Scofield, Gene Roma, and Dean Anderson, who later went on to become Chairman of the Percussion Department at Berklee College of Music.

Dean asked me to come and teach at Berklee in 1977. After eight years at Berklee, I left for the West Coast, where I pursued my playing career. Eventually my wife and I missed New England and decided to buy a home in Massachusetts. Recently I returned to teaching at Berklee.