| |
| About this release |
| |
 |
Very rarely we come across a record that defies categorisation. The Roundtable - Spinning Wheel album is one of those records. Uniquely British, it was originally released in 1969 and merged two popular musical genres of the time - early English medieval music and jazz-rock. Comprising a selection of well-chosen pop covers and a couple of original numbers, the album has been a cult record with collectors and leftfield DJs in the UK for some time so we thought that the time was right to bring it to a wider audience. One reason that the album works so well is that it's obvious that every musician on the session is enjoying what they're playing - we wanted to know who played on the record, and why such an apparently odd combination of styles should work so well together. Producer Ken Barnes kindly answered our many questions about the circumstances of the Roundtable session and how the concept came into being. |
| LS: How did you first become involved in the music business? |
| KB: My parents wanted me to be a draughtsman, but I wasn't into it. I came to London to be a journalist and I got to write for publications like Jazz News, Crescendo, and Gramophone Record Review and then I drifted into working with Polydor for a while and then onto the marketing department at Decca. One day I went to a session as I was editing the Decca house magazine at the time, and Dick Rowe was the producer. As I was listening to it I thought that the balance wasn't quite right. They were listening to the playback thinking that something was wrong with it. And I, big mouth that I am, I said 'you're hiding the lead trumpet', and Dick looked at me, and the arranger said 'you're absolutely right Ken'. He knew, but didn't want to say anything, as he was just an employee. I thought it would get me the sack, but instead it got me a job as producer! |
| LS: What other projects were you involved in around that time? |
| KB: I went through all kinds of things; I remember I turned down the chance to produce 'Please Release Me' for Engelbert Humpadinck, as I wasn't crazy about his singing. I was staff producer at Decca, and not on a royalty. This really gave me the idea to do it freelance if I was going to do it at all, and then I would be on a royalty. So I've been freelance ever since 1972. I worked on many things for EMI, Polydor and other labels and then I went to the states and worked in Nashville and also with people like Bing Crosby. I've had a publishing company with Pete Moore for the last 30 years now-we have the Pearl & Dean theme, which is his biggest thing! |
| LS: What was your biggest hit as a producer? |
| KB: Numerically, that would be Slim Whitman's 'Red River Valley', which was at number one here for five weeks, and they put it out in the states and they couldn't sell two copies until Capitol put it on TV, and then we did 1.7 million! But the artist that we've probably made the most money from has been Bing Crosby. I did six albums with Bing and they were all good sellers. We were only meant to do one, but they did so well. Just this week I've finished putting together a three CD set of his radio shows for an American company called Shout Factory; the same people who put together the Rhino label for Warner Brothers. That should be out in August 2004. |
| LS: How did the idea for the Roundtable album materialize? |
| KB: I was a director of the Sutton Sound recording studio in Soho; it's now the Sony building. This was in 1969 and we'd made a bit of a dent in the industry; I'd been to New York and got some clients and we were recording all sorts of different things and I was studio manager and was getting the business in. One of the directors was a friend of [the Early Music Consort's] David Munrow and they wanted to make an album, and they thought about what was the best way to present them. They'd done some Early Music Consort type of albums before and we thought it would be good to do a little experiment. We actually did two; one with Indian music combined with jazz, after the fashion of Ravi Shankar and Stan Tracey. We got some Indian musicians in and some jazz musicians and we called it 'Curried Jazz', and it was very successful. So we thought about other musical hybrids that we could do and we got the early music together with a jazz-rock backing. We kicked the idea around and had quite a few meetings about it and then I brought in Ken Moule to do the recording. He booked some good guys and we went in and did it all in about three sessions. It was inspired a little bit by Blood, Sweat & Tears, so we named the album 'Spinning Wheel'. The name of the group was mine; I thought that Roundtable had a medieval feel to it but the 'round' element went well with the jazz ideas. |
| LS: How did you come to work with Sutton Sound? |
| KB: I'd been recording and they just came to me as they thought I would be a good guy to head up their commercial side. The company didn't live too long as we couldn't renew the lease on the studio. We had money, but we couldn't go past the lease date on the building and they were bought up. It was a shame as we had the potential to be a very important studio and we did a lot of work in the two or three years that we were there. After that I got a job as the European product manager for Ampex. I had to commute from my flat in Twickenham to the factory they had in Neuville in Belgium and I was responsible for tape production. It was the heyday of the eight-track tape then and I set up a series of tapes called 'Music For The Motorway' with lots of session stuff. It was all very short-lived though and it swung straight away over to cassettes. I did that for a couple of years, and as I'd been producing for them I decided that there was more for me on that side of things. The next thing I knew I was working internationally as a freelance producer. |
| LS: What was it to work with such highly regarded classical musicians? |
| KB: They were OK. David Munrow was always a little bit dour; he was a very fine musician and he took it all very seriously. Christopher Hogwood was a very fine keyboard player and he did the harpsichord, then we had things on it like a sackbut, which gave it all a very different flavour. |
| LS: How did you hear of their expertise in this field? |
| KB: As I said, David Munrow was a friend of one of the directors and he was doing concerts at the time that were quite well received. I thought it was a wonderful idea to be playing music from medieval times and they wanted to make an album that was a little different to the kind of stuff they had recorded before. The arrangements had to be very carefully structured so that they didn't upset the identity of the early music consorts, so that it didn't look like a tree graft. Ken wasn't always happy about everything. He'd ask if we thought it was OK and we'd give very careful thought to it and maybe change things, even on the studio floor, if they didn't work. I'd say that it was more inspiration before anything else. We didn't want it to seem like it was too pretentious; we wanted to create something that would have listening appeal across a fairly broad spectrum. I don't know if we succeeded, but we tried. |
| LS: Was the mass-appeal concept at the bottom of choosing songs that were currently popular? |
| KB: Yes, we wanted to make sure that there was some commercial angle, or some recognition angle where people would see it and there would be at least some familiar material. Of course, 'Scarborough Fair' was period material in itself, long before Paul Simon picked it up. |
| LS: Your own composition 'The Girl I Used To Know' has a very authentic flavour to it. |
| KB: Arthur Johnson had a fragment of a melody that I thought was rather good and I just embellished on it further. We did actually do a lyric for it, but I wasn't too happy with it. We didn't record it for that album, but it did appear on another later on, and we really wanted it onto the Roundtable record as it was a song that Sutton Sound were able to publish. |
| LS: Was 'Saturday Gigue' written specifically for this project? |
| KB: Yes, it was something that Ken Moule had kicking around and I think it was called that either because he wrote it on a Saturday or that we recorded it on a Saturday. |
| LS: How well did the Roundtable record sell at the time? |
| KB: I really don't know. I never saw any sales figures for it, but it did get some pretty good reviews and it was fairly well distributed. I think that President did a good job with it. I don't want to put President down or anything, but maybe it should have gone to a bigger label and we might have made more of it. When President showed an interest I think that whoever was doing the selling of it, and I wasn't involved in that, probably licensed it to the first one that came along, just to do the deal. But they did do a nice job on it, so everyone was happy. |
| LS: The sleeve is wonderful, do you have any idea who is responsible for that? |
| KB: That would have come from President's art department. |
| LS: How did the jazz players react to working with all of the other strange instrumentation? |
| KB: They really liked it! There was a real sense of camaraderie between the two sides, and I know they got on as people. Even once or twice during the sessions David Munrow would smile, and he was a very serious young man. All of the jazz guys were pleased because for them it represented something different to what they were normally doing. Those guys would be playing two or three sessions a day at those times; going from Geoff Love and a Manuel session in the morning to working with Quincy Jones or Henry Mancini in the afternoon. Record companies would not have existed if it were not for those musicians, yet today they don't seem to have any place in the scheme of things. |
| LS: Do you remember some of the other players on the session? |
| KB: Kenny Clare was the drummer, as far as I can recall, the brass section would have been; trumpets: Greg Bowen, Kenny Baker, Eddie Blair & Leon Calvert (also flugelhorn), trombones: Don Lusher, John Marshall, Johnny Edwards and Jackie Armstrong, the reeds were Pete Swinfield and Roy Willocks. I worked with a lot of those guys regularly, so they would have been the same throughout. Kenny Clare was always Ken Moule's first choice. Ken had been an arranger with the Ted Heath band and he did a very successful thing called 'Jazz At Toad Hall'; a suite based on The Wind In The Willows. On bass there was Jeff Clyne and possibly Pete Morgan as well. I bumped into Jeff a while ago and we talked about some of the old sessions. |
| LS: Did the studio engineers have to make any special provisions for all of the strange instruments? |
| KB: It was recorded in the Sutton Sound studio, and the whole thing had to be very well set up. The engineer was Mike Hall, with me producing and Mark Sutton, one of the directors, was probably the second engineer. |
| LS: We believe David Munrow committed suicide in the mid-1970's. |
| KB: It wouldn't surprise me. I didn't know him very well; but he looked like a deeply serious young man who could have been drawn to depression, and yet on these sessions I saw him smile a few times. He did a lot of work for the BBC and he was never short of work; I don't know if he felt that his career was limited or not, but his suicide might not have had anything to do with that. He was a brilliant musician and I respected him enormously. He must have only been in his thirties when he died. I never kept in touch with Christopher Hogwood, but he was a very charming and bright guy and a very skilled player. |
| LS: Can you tell us more about the 'Curried Jazz' album? |
| KB: I decided to take a crash-course on what Indian music was all about, and discovered that the improvisations would not take place on a chord sequence, like the jazz style, but generally they hit a drone and then played on that. From time to time the drone would change, with changes of pitch, called a meend. There was also no given bar structure; a jazz musician can improvise for five minutes and then tell you exactly how many bars he has played, but the Indian musicians don't have that discipline; theirs is not based on bar lines, so to bring these two cultures together was a very interesting premise. Once the jazz musicians grasped the idea of what the Indian musicians were doing, then I got the arranger, a guy called Victor Graham, simply to score it based on the Indian drone structures. He gave the jazz musicians written parts that resembled chord sequences and bar lines and then it came together. Very often the jazz musicians would play up to a certain point on a theme and then they would lay out and the Indian musicians would then take it on. I was very surprised that it came together as well as it did. MFP were not at all sure if it would sell or not, but it did about 15,000 in the first five or six weeks. |
| LS: Where did you find the musicians? |
| KB: The sitar was played by Dev Kumar and I had to ask around to find them, making one call after another. They were all lovely guys. I think his wife played on there too. It wasn't a big line up; seven jazz players and four Indian players. |
| LS: How did your association with Harry Roche begin? |
| KB: I'd known Harry Roche from the many sessions we'd done and we'd often go and have a drink or two. I became interested in this weird line-up that he'd put together for broadcasting on the BBC. It was quite different as it had eight trombones; nine with Harry on valve trombone, with only a small contingent in the upper register; the flutes and so on, but mainly it was a big, wide sonorous trombone sound. It shouldn't really have worked, but it did and it became quite appealing to many people. I produced his 'Spindrift' album for EMI and Don Lusher's arrangement of 'Hawaii-Five-O' was a hit. That was when I met Pete Moore, as he was one of the arrangers on it. I struck up a good friendship with Pete and we really hit it off; still do to this day. Then I got Pye interested in doing the 'Sometime' album. |
| LS: Enter our old friend John Didlock! |
| KB: Yes. He was interested in investing in the band and he put on a couple of concerts with them. I then met Johnny Mercer who was doing a show with Andre Previn. Andre was very busy jetting off around the world at that time and while Johnny was sitting around waiting I asked him to do a session with the Constellation. He did a couple of tracks which we intended to put on the 'Spiral' album, but then we played it to Pye and they were so impressed they wanted an entire Jonny Mercer album. |
| LS: Can you tell us more about the track 'Spiral'? |
| KB: That was all Pete's work; he's a man of inspiration and he put all sorts of voices and synthesizers on there. We had a hell of a job with the synthesizers. We had to get a programmer in to make sure that we could hit the right pitch for the chord sequence. Once we had that we could then bring in the bits we needed at certain points during the track. Its got all kinds of lops and echo effects; it's just a great big psychedelic happening! Pete was inspired; he was really enthused about it on the session. |
| LS: What is the nature of your current business? |
| KB: DVD's. For my sins I'm also a film historian, and I've done lectures at film societies and theatres here and there. I don't want to sound immodest, but I've got an encyclopedic knowledge of movies! Universal hired me to do Citizen Cane last year for its UK edition; I got Barry Norman in to host it and I did the audio commentary. I've done lots of things with Sinatra movies, like The Man With The Golden Arm, and many others. The DVD is a sensational medium; it's really exploded in just four years, but most of the companies don't have movie buffs in them; for example, in the last few months I've put together eighteen DVD's for Universal. Our companies website has become a sort of haven for movie buffs and our message board is very busy! |
| Contemporary reviews of The Roundtable's releases |
| Special thanks to Sam Szczepanski at President Records for sourcing the following reviews from their archives. |
| Record Buyer, April 1970: The Rountable: Spinning Wheel |
| The Roundtable is hinged on recorder player David Munrow and harpsichordist Christopher Hogwood. They take eight familiar pop numbers, add the powerful jazz-tinged arrangements of Arthur Johnson and Ken Moule, a dash of blues, gospel, ballad, but most important, a medieval flavour. The result is a compelling and fascinating album - it's quite something to hear a tinkling harpsichord and a whispy recorder fronting a wailing big band and it works. They transform the hackneyed 'Scarborough Fair', reveal the great melodic strength of Lennon/McCartney's 'Michelle' and come to a slam-bang finale with a fiery 'Spinning Wheel' where the brass match up to even Blood Sweat And Tears. The use of two drummers in the rhythm section gives added force. |
| Music Business Weekly, January 17, 1970: Saturday Gigue |
| Inventive jazz instrumental that opens with a standard funky bass beat intro before surprising by breaking into jig tempo and some excellent sax work. Rather infectious and an interesting taste of a forthcoming album. |
| Record Buying News, January 1970: Saturday Gigue |
| Having never before heard of a band called The Roundtable, I can only assume that they are recording studio session musicians. One thing I do know, however, is that this record is a fine example of instrumental 'pop' music. Given the radio plays, 'Saturday Gigue' could very well be a bg hit, because it will appeal to a wide range of record buyers. It is a fusion of jazz and pop, with an outstanding, repetitive chorus, and is one of those all-too-rare instrumental records of true quality. An added attraction for anyone contemplating buying this record is the fine recording of the modern-day standard 'Scarborough Fair'. An excellent piece of trumpet playing can be heard on this jazz-flavoured tune. |
| Music Business Weekly, 21st March 1970: The Rountable: Spinning Wheel |
| Intriguing British experimental jazz album, putting medieval instruments including a shwn, descant recorder, harpsichord and regal, with three flugelhorns, two woodwind and a two-drummer rhythm section. The material is mostly pop - 'Eli's Coming', 'This guy's in love with you' etc - inventively arranged by Ken Moule and Arthur Johnson. Best track is Moule's whirling 'Saturday Gigue'. |
| Disc And Music Echo, February 7th 1970: The Rountable: Spinning Wheel |
| The Roundtable are a fine instrumental jazzy outfit who on Spinning Wheel produce original and interesting arrangements of familiar songs. We liked the 'Fantasia on a Theme' by Lennon and McCartney and 'Scarborough Fair'. Others include 'Eli's Coming', 'Where do you go?', 'This guy's in love with you', 'Eli's Coming' and the title track. |
| Ilford and Red. Pic., February 11th 1970: The Rountable: Spinning Wheel |
| If you like a combination of jazz, folk, baroque, gospel and blues - kind of medieval music with pop influences - injected into eight well-known numbers and performed by a group of superb musicians plyaing such ancient instruments as shawms, crumhorns and regals, then you MUST buy this album. The stars are David Munrow (also on descant recorder) and Chris Hogwood (harpsichord), two highly-respected interpreters of medieval sounds, but the effect achieved when they mix with three flugelhorns, two woodwinds, piano, organ and a driving rhythm section powered by two drummers is quite amazing. You will hardly recognise Laura Nyro's 'Eli's Coming', Lennon & McCartney's 'Michelle', or Blood Sweat And Tears 'Spinning Wheel'. 'Scarborough Fair' and 'This guy's in love with you' are also gems and the arrangements are so complex that it will take you a dozen plays to pick out everything that is going on. It is impossible to describe the beauty or fascinating rhythms on paper. All I can say is that it is one of the finest albums I have ever recommended. |
