Karen Tweed

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #135 (April/May 2008).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Karen Tweed

Many Sides of the Tweed

by Lahri Bond

On a sweltering summer evening in July 2007, a small but enthusiastic crowd gathered inside the Guiding Star Grange in Greenfield, Massachusetts, to hear a new band called Undertoe. Acoustic instruments played without amplification or PA and lit mostly by a string of Christmas tree lights, the festivities couldn't have been any lower-key. While two of the players were local, the fiddler and accordion player were from the United Kingdom. As the music began to gently swell, the barefoot accordionist with the shocking orange hair leaned back and closed her eyes. With a smile, she improvised a lead part that was melodic and perfectly empathetic to this rhythmic and mellow tune.

This was a standard evening for English piano accordionist Karen Tweed, who is one of the busiest and most sought-after musicians in folk and world music. She has been a member of more than seven bands (often several at the same time) and has been featured on 30-plus recordings. Tweed is also in demand for her work as an arranger, composer, and teacher. She is a skilled graphic artist, and up until 1989 she was a full-time art and design teacher at Bexhill High School, Sussex, a post she left to become a professional musician, working with bands such as the Poozies, the Kathryn Tickell Band, and Swåp.

As of the new year, Tweed has consciously decided to cut back on work after what she described on her MySpace page as "quite a year of family illness and bereavement." What this "slowing down" translates into is that she is doing only twice as many projects as most musicians would take on. Most notably, she has officially left both the Poozies and Swåp, her two longest-running groups, and has taken the winter months off from her duo with guitarist Roger Wilson. "The problem is you take one thing out of the equation, and another four pop up," Tweed mused. Currently, her busy schedule still includes working with Circa Compania, an all-female ensemble, and taking part in the Accordionesse, an all-female accordionist tour for autumn 2008. She also has been spending a lot more time in the States, working with Undertoe, comprising Tweed; Stuart Kenney on five-string banjo and upright bass; Marko Packard, who plays flutes, guitar, tenor saxophone, whistles, oboe, and vocals; and newest member John Dipper from Yorkshire, who also tours the world with Tweed as her fiddle accompanist.

[cover #135]