Nahum Perferkovich was born in 1945 in Riga, to a musical mother and a chemical-engineer father, and started violin and piano at eight. By twelve he was drawn to jazz, Dixieland and mambo over the radio; at thirteen he was already working as a café pianist with a Jewish orchestra, and he doubled on viola in a military community-center symphony orchestra. By 1961, at sixteen, he was part of Riga's small jazz scene, performing with singer Lev Pilchuk. Drafted into the Soviet army in 1964, he formed an unofficial orchestra and taught himself clarinet in secret; in 1966 he was sent to help rebuild after the Tashkent earthquake, playing dance music there. After his 1968 discharge he joined saxophonist Boris Gamer's ensemble Combo, which placed first in Czech jazz-recording competitions and toured major Soviet festivals.

He immigrated to Israel in 1971, settling first in Nazareth Illit and then Jerusalem, and auditioned into Roman Kunsman's band Platina at Café Noga in Tel Aviv. In Platina he played electric and acoustic piano alongside Alona Turel on Hammond and Rhodes, and is separately credited on viola and melodica on other sessions of the period; the Discogs credits for Platina's two officially released albums list him only on keys, while prose biographies also describe him playing clarinet and viola in the band's live sets. Platina played New York's Avery Fisher Hall in 1974 as part of that year's Newport Jazz Festival programming. He left the band at the end of 1975, replaced by Kobi Arlik, and simultaneously held the principal viola chair in the Israel Radio symphony orchestra; a four-month stint arranging for the Israeli Air Force orchestra followed his 1975 draft into that service.

Through the mid-to-late 1970s he worked with singers Yehoram Gaon, Edna Goren, and Chava Alberstein. He is credited on melodica on a track of Meir Ariel's 1979 album and on viola on Yardena Arazi's 1987 album Gypsy Soul. From 1980 to 2013 he taught in the jazz department of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance; after retiring from that post he continued teaching at Hed College and leading jazz and Dixieland ensembles. He appeared at a Platina-related event at Shabool club, Tel Aviv port, in October 2016, and a since-undated video shows him leading a jazz ensemble at a music school. His current status could not be confirmed.

Perferkovich's most distinctive credential is melodica: a Hebrew-language biography credits him as among the first to play jazz on the instrument, developing it while still in Latvia and later building a specialized method for teaching jazz through it — a claim that, while single-sourced, is corroborated by an actual melodica session credit on a Meir Ariel recording. His documented recording work otherwise sits squarely inside Platina's jazz-rock and fusion idiom, on Fender Rhodes and acoustic piano alongside Alona Turel's own keyboard work, with viola and clarinet as secondary instruments drawn from his classical training and Soviet-era big-band background.