On September 8, 1960, Oscar Pettiford died at Frederiksberg Hospital in Copenhagen, aged 37, of what doctors called a virus closely related to polio — though at least one account instead blames complications from a car crash two years earlier. He had moved to Denmark in 1958 and never came back. Pettiford's stranger bequest to jazz was the cello, and he arrived at it twice by accident. The first time was a gag on Woody Herman in the late 1940s: he walked offstage in the middle of his bass solo and returned to the bandstand carrying the wrong instrument. The second time he meant it. In 1949 he broke his arm, found the bass unplayable, borrowed a friend's cello, tuned it in fourths an octave above the bass, and worked through his convalescence with his arm in a sling. He was recording on it by 1950. His final studio date, cut in Copenhagen two months before he died, was titled My Little Cello.
Oscar Pettiford at the Aquarium, New York, ca. November 1946 — three years before the broken arm that put a cello in his hands. (Photo: William P. Gottlieb, Library of Congress Gottlieb Collection, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Sources: Oscar Pettiford — Wikipedia , My Little Cello — Wikipedia (Copenhagen 1959–60 sessions, his final studio recordings) , Jazz Cellists: Essential Listening and Iconic Jazz Cello Players — Jazzfuel , "Oscar Pettiford born 30 September 1922" — From The Vaults (Frederiksberg Hospital; the competing car-accident account)
← See every This Day in Jazz