Vanderlei Pereira grew up in Macae, a coastal city a little over 100 miles north of Rio de Janeiro, the youngest of seven children in a family that produced three working musicians. Two of his brothers went professional ahead of him: the saxophonist and arranger Dulcilando, known in Brazil as Maestro Macae, who played on records and shows for Chico Buarque, Simone, Adriana Calcanhotto and Djavan, and the bassist Dirceu. At eight, before anyone bought him an instrument, he assembled a drum kit out of cookie tins and taught himself on it. Formal study followed at Macae's Sociedade Musical Nova Aurora, where he learned theory and sight reading, and he was working professionally as a teenager, splitting his time between local pop and rock cover bands and the jazz records his brothers brought home.

He had been diagnosed at six with retinitis pigmentosa, the inherited retinal disease that narrows and then closes the visual field. It progressed slowly enough that he built a conventional career first. Following his brothers to Rio in the 1970s, he worked across three separate scenes at once: jazz, popular music and the concert hall. He completed a six-year performance internship with the Orquestra Sinfonica Brasileira, studying classical percussion with Luiz Almeida d'Anunciacao, known as Pinduca, and with K. David Johnson, and he took a diploma and teaching certificate in theory, rhythm and sight singing at Rio's Academia de Musica Lorenzo Fernandez. As his sight deteriorated he concluded that orchestral work, which depends on reading a part in real time, was closing to him, and he moved to jazz and Brazilian popular music full time. He lost his vision completely at thirty-one. By then he was a first-call jazz drummer in Rio and a respected samba and MPB player, and his earliest surviving recorded work dates from that period: drums and percussion on the guitarist Piry Reis's self-titled 1980 LP for Plug, then Reis's Caminho do Interior (1984) and Rio Zero-Grau (Carmo, 1986).

He moved to New York in 1988, his own press materials and his Discogs entry agree on that year, though at least one interview places the move in 1986. He arrived blind, in a city he did not know, and went straight back to school, taking a diploma in Jazz Studies at Mannes College of Music and studying privately with a deliberately mixed group of drummers: Elvin Jones's tradition through John Riley and Vernel Fournier on the jazz side, and Ignacio Berroa, Bobby Sanabria and Johnny Almendra on the Cuban and Latin side. The work came quickly. Over the next three decades he became one of the standing drum chairs of the New York Brazilian scene, recording and touring with Toots Thielemans, Airto Moreira, Flora Purim, Sivuca, Johnny Alf, Dom Salvador, Tito Puente, Leny Andrade, Rosa Passos, Paul Winter, Arturo O'Farrill's Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, Claudio Roditi, Bebel Gilberto, Leila Pinheiro, Romero Lubambo, Emilio Santiago, Antonio Adolfo, Quarteto em Cy, Beth Carvalho and Jamelao, among many others. The recorded trail runs from the harmonica player Hendrik Meurkens's Poema Brasileiro (Concord Picante, 1996) and the blind Brazilian pianist Manfredo Fest's Amazonas (Concord Picante, 1997) through six tracks of Susannah McCorkle's Hearts and Minds (Concord Jazz, 2000) to Paul Meyers's World on a String (Miles High, 2009) with Helio Alves and Donny McCaslin.

In 1991 he co-founded Sabor Brasil with the American singer, pianist and percussionist Susan Pereira, whom he married in 1995. The group became one of the more durable Brazilian bands in New York, playing Lincoln Center, Dizzy's Club and the Iridium and festivals in Rochester and Savannah, and its debut record Tudo Azul (Riony Records, 2007) brought in Claudio Roditi on trumpet, Meurkens on harmonica, Romero Lubambo on guitar and Luis Bonilla on trombone around the working band. A second long-running partnership is SanfoNYa Brasileira, the accordion trio he shares with Vitor Goncalves and the bassist Eduardo Belo, whose self-titled album appeared on September 1, 2018 with Steve Wilson guesting on saxophones. Two of its eight tracks point straight back at the drummer: "O Que Ficou," a Pereira composition he would record again two years later, and "Sambete do Vandeco," named for the nickname he has carried since Macae.

In March 2011 he took the drum and percussion chair on Yotam Silberstein's Brasil (Jazz Legacy Productions 1101016), cut at Alleycat Studio in South Orange, New Jersey. The pressing separates the core band from the guests precisely, and Pereira is in the first group: he and pianist David Feldman and bassist John Lee carry all eleven tracks, while Roy Hargrove, Toninho Horta, Paquito D'Rivera, Claudio Roditi and Sharel Cassity each appear on a named handful. The same label used him twice more the following year, on Roy Assaf's Respect, Vol. 1 and Mark Gross's Blackside.

He waited more than thirty years in New York before making a record under his own name. Vision for Rhythm (Jazzheads JH1242), taped in 2019 in Shohola, Pennsylvania and released May 22, 2020, introduced the sextet Blindfold Test: Susan Pereira on voice and percussion, Jorge Continentino on flute, alto flute, pifano and tenor saxophone, Rodrigo Ursaia on tenor, Deanna Witkowski on piano, Paul Meyers on acoustic guitar, and Gustavo Amarante and Itaiguara Brandao splitting the electric bass chair. The band's name is his own joke turned into a working method: on the hardest material his sighted bandmates put on blindfolds, which levels the field and, incidentally, is the only way any of them will ever hear the charts the way he does. The twelve tracks set two Pereira originals and a closing two-minute unaccompanied drum piece against a survey of living Brazilian composers, Airto Moreira's "Misturada," Edu Lobo's "Corrupiao," Antonio Adolfo's "Partido Leve," Toninho Ferragutti's "Chapeu Palheta," Nando Lauria's "The Cry and the Smile," Kimson Plaut's "Mercado Modelo," Jasnam Daya Singh's "Les Matins de Rixensart" and Zeca Freitas's "Alma Brasileira." Bobby Sanabria, one of his old teachers, wrote the liner notes. DownBeat made it an Editors' Pick in June 2020, and Airto Moreira sent word that it carried the best version of "Misturada" so far.

A second leader credit surfaced from the archive fourteen years into that wait, and thirty-one years after it was made. Simplicity, a piano trio session with Dom Salvador and the bassist Bill Moring, was recorded direct to two-track at Acoustic Recording in March 1993 and shelved; Salvador finally mastered and issued it in September 2024, with a remastered CD following on his own Salvador Records in 2025. All three players wrote liner notes for it, and so did Ron Carter. Alongside the playing, Pereira has taught for most of his New York years: adjunct faculty at City College of New York and The New School, instructor at Drummers Collective and the New York Jazz Academy, and a master-class guest at Berklee, Rutgers, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, the University of Delaware, California Brazil Camp and the Escola de Musica de Brasilia. Blindfold Test remains a working band, with dates booked into late 2026.

Pereira belongs to the line of Brazilian drummers who carried the country's rhythms onto a jazz kit without diluting either half, the line that runs from Milton Banana through Dom Um Romao to Airto Moreira, and he names Airto and Nana Vasconcelos alongside Elvin Jones and Tony Williams as his models. What separates him from a jazz drummer who has learned some samba patterns is the order in which he learned them: samba, baiao, maracatu, frevo and choro were his first language, the conservatory percussion training at the Orquestra Sinfonica Brasileira gave him the hands, and bebop phrasing arrived third, on top. Modern Drummer, reviewing Nando Lauria's Points of View, singled out his readings of the Brazilian styles rather than his soloing, which is the right emphasis: he is a colorist and an accompanist first, and the two-minute solo that closes Vision for Rhythm is, as one Brazilian reviewer put it, tasteful rather than a display of speed. Blindness has shaped the working method more than the sound. He learns and teaches everything by ear, memorises whole books of charts, and built a band whose central gesture is to ask everyone else to work the way he does.