NHØP is born in a village outside greater Copenhagen. His childhood in a Danish school environment characterized by the vicar N. F. S. Grundtvig, who created an influential cultural stream in Denmark in the 19.th century, has had a decisive influence on his music. He continues this special tradition with roots in the Danish and Swedish national traditions while at the same time expressing himself as a bassist in the modern jazz with origins in bop. Among the musicians Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen has played with and who have played a major role in his carrier are Dexter Gordon, Kenny Drew, Ben Webster and Oscar Peterson. Among other collaborators in his own generation are in addition Philip Catherine, Sonny Rollins, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Pass and Martial Solal. He has also played with musicians who belonged to generations elder than himself. Among these are Benny Carter, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Stéphane Grappelli, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Miles Davis.
Already in 1961 did NHØP have his debut during a recording under the leadership of BentAxen. He had then not even reached the age of 15. In 1962 he succeeded Oscar Pettiford as the regular bassist in Jazzhouse Montmartre in Copenhagen. He accompanied Bud Powell the same year, and also made the recording Bouncing With Bud, and although NHØP still was a very young man his name began - as a consequence of the cooperation with Bud Powell - to be known outside Denmark. He soon left the gymnasium - without passing the exam - to become a fulltime professional musician, among other things also as a member of The Radiojazzgroup and the Danish Radio Big Band (now known as the Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra). He got an offer in 1965 from Count Basie, but was not in a position to be able to accept it (but he recorded many years later with Basie). That year he also toured with Bill Evans (p) and Sonny Rollins, and particularly the cooperation with the energetic Rollins in a "pianoless" trio, made a big impression on NHØP.
His engagement with Jazzhouse Montmartre however remained decisive to him. It appears from the discography that he played with Dexter Gordon (ts) and together with Kenny Drew (p) and the Danish drummer Alex Riel they formed an American-Danish quartet, which was one of the continual elements in the jazz house, and accompanied as trio (without Gordon) visiting foreign musicians, who came to Copenhagen. The city reached a peak as European jazz city in the middle of the sixties.
NHØP's roots in the Grundtvigian environment and his participation in the jazz environment in the sixties - a decade where jazz no longer was the most preferred music among the youth - explain to a large extent, why general tendencies in the decade, symbolically expressed in the music of Beatles and the demonstrations against the Vietnam war - passed NHØP by without making any greater impression. In Jazzhouse Montmartre he soon played with Ben Webster, and Webster's formidable ability in the playing of ballads together with the playing with Dexter Gordon and Kenny Drew has been a decisive apprenticeship for him.
In 1971 he made the first recording with Oscar Peterson, and from 1973 he was a regular member of the Oscar Peterson trio. Peterson, who next to Kenny Drew is the pianist with whom NHØP got the closest musical cooperation, was very demanding for the Danish bassist, who however has a technique which matches with Peterson's piano technique. They made several recordings through the years. Finally in 1975 the first recording of NHØP came in his own name. It had the title Jaywalking, but the breakthrough to the public, who is normally not a part of the jazz scene, came already in 1973 with the record Duo made with Kenny Drew. Although this record in no way was conceived as a political record - NHØP is neither conservative nor left wing progressive but somewhere in between - the record with titles like Det var en lørdag aften (Once a Saturday night) and I skovens dybe stille ro (In the still of the woods) both traditionals in the Danish music hit a strong tendency of the time. This tendency was even stronger in the 1975 recording of Ole Kock Hansen, a musical partner to NHØP since the childhood. This record was titled Folkevise (Folksong) and the repertoire consisted exclusively of old Danish pieces. In the following years NHØP has recorded many pieces from the traditional Danish repertoire, for instance Tango Jalousi which is also known to an international public, and pieces from the Swedish choir repertoire. This is all in accordance with the cultural environment which orginally formed NHØP.
He left the Oscar Peterson trio in 1986 and since then he has been a freelancer or leader of his own groups, who in the nineties mainly have been of the trio format (with guitar and drums), but although the career soon will have lasted four decades we have only heard less than twenty records from NHØP in his own name. He received as the first musician outside the ranks of composers of so-called score music the Nordic Council Music Prize in 1991, one of the largest music prizes in Scandinavia.