In Brief
- Title: Ta’Mig Med (Take me Along)
- Musician: Jesper Sivebaek, guitar.
- Identification: OUR Recordings 8.226915.
- Recording date: 2021, Snowville Recording Studio.
- Year of Publishing: 2021.
Lots of Success by Kim Larsen
Review
The subject of this review is the album Ta’ Mig Med (Take me Along) by Danish guitarist Jesper Videbaek. The album is entirely devoted to arrangements of songs by Danish pop star Kim Larsen (1945-2018).
Before I dive into the review, I’ll tell you the story of how I got this CD.
In 1998 I started my Website the DOS Amigos Homepage. Part of that site is dedicated to music for guitar duo. This section also contained a few arrangements of pop songs that I had made for DOS Amigos. Due to copyrights, however, no sheet music was included.
In 2005 I got an email from Denmark asking for the sheet music of one of those pop songs. That e-mail came from Ole from Copenhagen, an amateur guitarist just like me, a History and English teacher at a secondary school in Copenhagen, now retired, and an active (editorial) member of the Danish guitar association Dansk Guitar Selskab.
Well, on an individual basis I can share that music and it was also a very kind request. A lot better than the Chinese who more or less demanded me to send the entire content of the website to him. I sent the pieces and added an email in which I introduced myself a bit more than on the site because I was curious about guitar life in Denmark.
That was the beginning of a pen friendship that still exists today. Ole has a huge collection of guitar CDs and sheet music, he gathers the material from all over the world and plays solo and duo himself. We keep in touch with two or three letters a year and we exchange CDs and sheet music. This gave me access to a number of beautiful recordings from the Scandinavian guitar world that are hardly available here. In turn, I send recordings that come from the Netherlands and are not in the store in Copenhagen.
That’s how I came into possession of Ta’Mig Med (Take me Along), the subject of this review.
The Danish classical guitarist Jesper Videbaek had not forgotten the pop songs from his youth and arranged twelve pieces by the Danish pop musician annex singer/songwriter Kim Larsen (1945-2018).
Kim Larsen himself was inspired by rock and roll music and The Beatles and decided to become a singer/songwriter annex protest singer. In the late sixties he founded the rock band Gasolin, which lasted until the late seventies. He even represented Denmark in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1979. After Gasolin, he founded a few more bands, of which the Danish-language band Kjukken had the longest life, more than twenty years until his death in 2018.
I must say that I am pleasantly surprised by the quality of the songs and also the arrangements. A good sound and well played. I’m getting curious about the originals. I can imagine Larsen was popular in Scandinavia. In the Netherlands I had never heard of him, and you will not find him in the top 40 of years ago. The tone of the songs takes me back to the time of the late sixties and early seventies.
No, it does not sound that there is a Gasolin song on this record, that band sounded a bit rawer than what I hear here. By the way, this shows the usefulness of Youtube, you can look it up just like that.
The arrangements are very good in my opinion, some remind me of the arrangements of pop (Paul Simon) and jazz (Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett) that Manuel Barrueco performed on his album Some Time Ago.
Recording quality is fine. The booklet also mentions the necessary luxury microphones. I like the sound, it is transparent, tight and relatively little processed, for example with regard to reverberation. The melody lines and accompaniment textures are easy to follow. Nice to meet you!
After listening a few times, I have developed a soft spot for this album. Not only because it is a symbol for a friendship that now spans more than fifteen years, but it is also nice to listen to the relaxed and well-finished play of Jesper Videbaek.
Recommended!