Percio Sapia (also written Percio Sappia or, with the Portuguese diacritic, Percio Sapia) is a Sao Paulo drummer whose career runs on two closely linked tracks: four and a half decades inside CLAM (Centro Livre de Aprendizado Musical), the popular-music-and-jazz school founded in 1963 by the original members of the Zimbo Trio, and a working chair in the Zimbo Trio itself. He enrolled at CLAM in 1976 as a drum student of Rubens "Rubinho" Barsotti, the Zimbo Trio's founding drummer, and of fellow instructor Joao Rodrigues Ariza, known as Chumbinho. He returned to CLAM in 1986 as a monitor and within a short time became a teacher and the supervisor of its drum department, a post he has held for decades.

Sapia's own account, given in a 2023 Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos oral-history thesis on Barsotti, describes a 35-year friendship and daily proximity with his teacher that predated formal study: his father was a musician and a close friend of Barsotti's, so Sapia knew him from early childhood. He eventually stepped into Barsotti's own chair, becoming the Zimbo Trio's drummer once age and health kept the founder from performing with the group regularly. Alongside pianist Amilton Godoy, the trio's other original member, Sapia's regular working partner on bass since around 2010 has been Mario Andreotti (also credited as Marinho Andreotti), who replaced an earlier interim bassist, Itamar Collaco. Founded in Sao Paulo in March 1964, the Zimbo Trio is widely credited, alongside a handful of contemporaries, as one of the pioneering groups of samba-jazz, and recorded roughly 51 albums over its founding lineup's 45-year run; Wikipedia's own summary of the group's style names "MPB, jazz, bossa nova" together.

Outside the Zimbo Trio, Sapia built a parallel career as a bandleader, session drummer, and producer in Sao Paulo's instrumental-music circle. He was a founding member of the groups Opera Brasil, Proscenium, and Luz de Emergencia, and of the piano-trio project Triálogo, a 2004 recording with pianist Debora Gurgel and bassist Itamar Collaco, tagged on Discogs as jazz and Latin jazz. He led his own record, Agora Sim (2011), billed on its own cover as "Brasil Jazz," featuring Amilton Godoy and Mario Andreotti among its rotating cast of bassists and pianists, and even a guest drum appearance from Rubens Barsotti himself on one track. Sapia also produced and arranged the album, and it includes his own version of "Nana," the Moacir Santos composition long associated with the Zimbo Trio's book. As a sideman and producer he has also recorded with singer-guitarist Filipe Moreau and singer Luciana Barros, the Conrado Paulino Quarteto, guitarist To Brandileone, and on a 2016 trio session led by Amilton Godoy himself. He has accompanied singers including Leny Andrade, Jane Duboc, Adriana Godoy, Fabiana Cozza, and Graca Cunha, and today contributes to Modern Drummer Brasil magazine and performs regularly with the group led by pianist Mario Boffa Jr.

In 2020, Sapia stepped outside the Brazilian scene entirely to co-lead Samba do Arraial (Tratore Records), billed as "The Roni Ben Hur and Percio Sapia Quartet, Special Guest Leny Andrade." The album paired Roni Ben-Hur, the Israeli-American jazz guitarist, with Sapia on drums, percussion, and production, Mario Andreotti on acoustic bass, Vinicius Barros on percussion, and veteran Brazilian vocalist Leny Andrade as a featured guest on four tracks, working through a set of Brazilian regional and popular repertoire. The presence of Andreotti, Sapia's regular Zimbo Trio bandmate, and of Andrade, whom Sapia had already accompanied for years in Brazil, places the session squarely inside the same circle of musicians documented throughout his career rather than a one-off studio pairing.

Sapia's playing is rooted in the samba-jazz vocabulary that Rubens Barsotti and the Zimbo Trio helped define: a light, propulsive samba pulse carried mostly on cymbals and hi-hat, with the snare's snares frequently disengaged in favor of a drier, more tom- and surdo-like sound closer to the samba percussion section than to a conventional jazz kit. Like his teacher, Sapia favors melody and harmony as the basis for improvisation over rudiment-driven technical display, and he has spoken of building his drumming around deep familiarity with a tune's form rather than isolated technique. His own 2011 record leans further into a self-described "Brasil Jazz" identity, and his choice to record "Nana," a Zimbo Trio standard, on that album with Barsotti himself as a guest drummer, underlines how directly his musical identity traces back to that lineage.