Music: Great Dane

Pedersen was one of the first bassists who could play melodies against a backdrop of four-finger chords.

During one fortnight this April three world-class bassists joined the big band in the sky. Jimmy Woode, one of Duke Ellington’s treasured bass players, died at 78; closely followed by 81-year-old Percy Heath, of the Modern Jazz Quartet. The youngest of the trio, and the first to depart, was the virtuosic Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen. He was only 58 years old.

Those who never heard Pedersen live can get some idea of what they missed from his entry in the Feather-Gitler International Encyclopedia of Jazz: ‘An astonishing virtuoso with a flawless sense of time, capable of some of the most creative solos ever played on the instrument.’ Fortunately The Great Dane with the Never-Ending Name, or NHØP as he was widely known, has left a legacy of more than 425 recording sessions.

Films and videos also conserve the genius of this instrumentalist who was his country’s leading bassist by the age of 15. The Danes cherished Pedersen not only as a musician but as a culturally involved citizen who opened a unique Danish door to jazz ­– instead of the American songbook, he sought his original materials in the Danish national psalm book and Scandinavian folksong.

Danish jazz historian Frank Büchmann-Møller explains that Pedersen was one of the first bassists who could play melodic themes and accompany himself with plucked four-finger chords, while others used one or maybe two fingers. ‘He did this superbly,’ says Büchmann-Møller, ‘but never in a way that went over people’s heads. His audiences were of all ages – he was a Danish institution, treated with regard and respect everywhere – and he had such an entertaining and humorous way of introducing his repertoire.’

Hugo Rasmussen, a freelance colleague of Pedersen who started on the bass at the same age, recalls quickly giving up the race. ‘To even try to come near his virtuosity was pointless,’ he explains. ‘In principle, he was the world master on contrabass. There was simply nobody who could play faster, purer or higher than Niels-Henning.’

The president of the Danish Contrabass Society, Andreas Bennetzen, says that ‘Pedersen set the modern standard of Danish and international bass playing and raised everybody’s level.’ Another of his contemporaries, Bo Stief, says he had to practise extra hard before every gig abroad: ‘Audiences expected me to be another fantastic Danish bassist!’

There was, of course, a Danish bass tradition before Pedersen, but he put Danish bass playing firmly on the map and in doing so spawned a new generation of players. ‘He was both a virtuoso and a great team player,’ says Dan Morgenstern, director of the Rutgers University Institute of Jazz Studies. ‘His sound was a thing of beauty, both plucked and bowed. And he bowed in tune, always.’

Pedersen was born on 27 May 1946 and brought up in a closely knit musical family in the little parish of Osted. His mother was the church organist and his father, two brothers and sister played or sang in the family band. When he was seven he began studying the piano, but it wasn’t until he was twelve that he started learning the bass, after hearing Copenhagen’s resident US bassist and cellist, Oscar Pettiford. Within three years he was the house bassist at Jazzhus Montmartre, the city’s foremost club, working closely with pianist Kenny Drew, saxophonists Ben Webster and Dexter Gordon and a roster of other great artists.

The bandleader and pianist Count Basie invited Pedersen to join his orchestra in the US when he was 17, but he was too young to qualify for a work permit. He continued his secondary education while studying privately with a conservatory teacher and was already in great demand in the clubs and recording studios. Over the years in Denmark and abroad, Pedersen performed with Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell, Stan Getz, Don Byas, Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Evans, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and many other great artists, recording with most of them.

The celebrated Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson took the young Pedersen on the road in 1972. By the time he left Peterson’s trio in 1987 he had recorded scores of albums and made countless concert and television appearances, including ones at the Royal Albert Hall in London and the BBC television studios. A member of the Danish Radio Big Band from 1964 to 1982, he led his own combos from the 1990s, mainly playing trios with the Swedish guitarist Ulf Wakenius and the drummers Lennart Gruvstedt or Jonas Johansen. Most recently he gave solo recitals and taught promising pupils at his studio in Ishøj.

The first time I saw Niels-Henning play, four feet away in a Copenhagen art gallery, was in a duet with the American pianist Kenny Drew. He took a long solo on his amplified Italian instrument. ‘That’s impossible,’ I remember whispering to my companion. ‘That’s not a guitar. You can’t play it that fast’. He played melody pizzicato in the high register — extraordinary in itself — and alongside chords on three and four strings. The line he spun with four plucking fingers sparkled with just the right tones and harmonics. Over the years, I heard NHØP several times live. On two occasions he was unaccompanied and spanned a pizzicato rainbow from jazz to Bach and back again in the same piece. He was a virtuoso whose wife urged him to ‘forget the virtuosity and just swing’. He did swing, in fact, but he may have become something of a prisoner of his own agility. As Rasmussen points out: ‘It was hard to have to constantly live up to the position he had put himself in.’

As the 89-year-old Danish violinist Svend Asmussen[i] remarked at a book signing in Odense this spring: ‘Life is sometimes unfairly apportioned and it’s a bit hard to understand why I am still alive, 31 years older than NHØP.’ The pair had recorded together on eight albums.

Pedersen at the Jazzhaus in Freiburg in 1990. He was a virtuoso and a team player, but above all Pedersen had swing.

PEDERSEN ON DISC

DUO 
Duo with Kenny Drew, piano

 Steeplechase 1002

 Chops with Joe Pass, guitar

 Pablo 2310830

 Looking at Bird with Archie Shepp, sax

 Steeplechase 1149

 The Viking with Philip Catherine, guitar

 Pablo 2310894

 AS SIDEMAN

 Anthropology with Don Byas

 Debut 142

 Peterson at the Montreux Jazz Festival 1975

 (Oscar Peterson, piano)

 Pablo 2310747

 Live at Montmartre with Stan Getz, sax
 Steeplechase 1073-4

 Skol (Stephane Grappelli, violin; Oscar Peterson, piano)

 Pablo 2307850

 AS LEADER

Jaywalkin’

 Steeplechase 1041

 Double Bass

 Steeplechase 1055

 To a Brother

 Pladekompagniet 481362-2

 This is All I Ask

 Verve 539695-2

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[i] SvendAsmussen, another Danish music idol, turned 94 in 2014.

The Strad August 2005 pg. 36-37