MARK TURNER wallows in the virtuosity of Swansea Jazz Festival openers, Simon Spillett and Pete Long

KAREN TWEED is perhaps best known as a top-drawer accordionist — take a listen to her on YouTube if you’re not familiar with her work — whose technical brilliance extracts a lyricism and layered tonalities, often crossing over into the realm of classical music rarely associated with the instrument.
But there’s a lesser-known string to Tweed’s bow. Her passion for sketching has its roots in the art education she received in the 1980s at Leeds School of Arts.
After a period of island-hopping, Tweed settled permanently on Orkney in 2018, the year her father passed away. He was her mentor and she found solace in nature and observing its ephemeral manifestations: “Nature in Orkney is also a powerful healer,” she says.

MICHAL BONCZA highly recommends a revelatory exhibition of work by the doyen of indigenous Australians’ art, Emily Kam Kngwarray

Despite an over-sentimental narrative, MICHAL BONCZA applauds an ambitious drama about the Chinese rescue of British POWs in WWII

Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet

New releases from Hannah Rose Platt, Kemp Harris, and Spear Of Destiny