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Written in fRoots issue 345, 2012


KAREN TWEED
Essentially Invisible To The Eye
May Monday Adventures MMA 6327002 (2012)

Karen Tweed is a master not just of the technique of piano-accordion but of something not all its practitioners are familiar with: sensitivity. But in all her restless roster of musical collaborations, duos, bands and projects, and indeed homes, she’s never got round to a completely solo accordion album. Here it is.
     The memorably-titled Essentially Invisible To The Eye, whose colourful cover-art reminds, as anyone observing her hair-styles and attire over the years will have noticed, that Tweed’s creativity doesn’t extend just to music, is something of a summing-up. She describes it as “a novel, an autobiography, a casserole and as close to a self portrait as I’m able to create”.
American fiddler, banjoist and guitarist Bruce Molsky produces. Some might wonder why a person playing entirely solo would need a producer. Well, the right producer doesn’t just oversee the technology, he’s co-conspirator, perceptive audience, perspective giver, and often provides the spur to starting an album and getting it finished.
     The twenty-four tune titles, her own and by other musicians she’s met along the way, and a couple of drifting quotes from popular song tunes from childhood, are grouped into just five tracks. The great advantage of that, as against a string of separated self-contained short pieces, is that it gives much more freedom to flow between melodies or rhythms, to leap to another thought in mid-tune, take a breath, quote, or reprise, and stop only when the moment feels right. An accordion may not look organic, but it breathes. Neither tour-de-diddly nor off-showing, Tweed isn’t driven by the nominal rhythms or formats of the tunes but gets in among the notes, pausing and thinking.
     It’s forty-one minutes in her company, by the flickering fireside, sharing a photo album.
     www.karentweed.com


© 2011 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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