Ole Frimer

Ole Frimer has been playing the blues since 1968 and holds a PhD in biology — a combination that has taken him from Aalborg to the Arctic Station in Greenland and back to the Danish blues circuit.

Born in Aalborg on 3 November 1952, he taught himself guitar at thirteen by watching school bands and listening to British pop and blues records. By fifteen he had his first blues group; in 1968 he was playing bass in a local soul band, which he counts as the start of his professional life. At twenty he moved to Aarhus to study biology and fell in with the local scene, playing in the Jensen Band and the FBN Trio and beginning a long association with the Danish blues singer Peter Thorup.

Greenland and the Frimer Band

He formed his first quartet, the Frimer Band, in 1989 and released the live debut Blues Uncovered. In 1990 he went to Greenland as scientific director of Copenhagen University's Arctic Station, staying until 1993 and completing a doctoral thesis on king eiders in 1994. The band resumed in 2008 and released Blålys in 2014, his first serious work writing in Danish.

Blue Junction and after

With the quartet Blue Junction, formed in 1996 with guitarist Uffe Steen, bassist Morten Brauner and drummer Esben Bach, he won two American Real Blues Awards and a Danish Music Award for the 2007 album Live Out of Love. He toured and recorded with Peter Thorup until Thorup's death in 2007, and produced the Greenlandic singer Varna's debut I Wish the same year.

He plays fingerstyle, flesh to strings, having abandoned the plectrum in the early 1980s, on Fender Telecasters and Stratocasters through a Fender Super Amp. The Ole Frimer Band released Faerd in 2020 and the concert album Live in Eppingen, and he received the Bluesnight Award in 2021.

Danish Music Award 2007 (Live Out of Love, with Blue Junction); two American Real Blues Awards; Bluesnight Award 2021