Jazz Performance Saturday! - "That's A Plenty" - Colin Bowden with Delta Jazz Band

 It's a new year and a new Jazz Performance Saturday! Last year we focused on piano players for the first Saturday of the month performances, this year it'll be drummers! Today's performance features a performance by British drummer Colin Bowden with Delta Jazz Band. It is from September 20, 2009 in HundertMeister, Duisburg, Germany.

Colin Bowden was born in 1932 in Hampstead Heath, London. It was during World War II at the age of ten when he spied a drummer playing through a window at a  village hall, that he realized he discovered something that fascinated him. Then as a teenager he began collecting jazz records of Spike Jones and Lu Watters.

He joined the RAF and bought and old drum set from a friend. At the end of 1952 he heard Jelly Roll Morton's  "Oh, Didn't He Ramble?"which made him settle on jazz. He readily admits that Baby Dodds and Big Sid Catlett are two of his influences.

He's considered on of the best of the European New Orleans style drummers. Consequently he has played with a diverse assortment of jazz players and bands, from Humphrey Lyttelton and Kenny Davernto Ken Colyer's Jazzmen.

That's A Plenty is a popular jazz tune that started out as a ragtime piece composed by Lew Pollack (1895-194). The sheet music was published by the Joe Morris Music Co. in 1914. Interestingly, it was decades later that Ray Gilbert (1912-1976) added lyrics to the tune. It appears that the first recording was done in 1914 by Prince's Band.

Featured in this video are Colin Bowden on drums, Pat Halcox on trumpet, Terry Giles on clarinet, Andy Maynard on banjo, Mike Pointon on trombone and John Sirett on bass.