In a professional jazz career that spanned 65 years Johnny Frigo never quite became a household name, although, like Woody Allen’s fictional character Leonard Zelig, he was clearly noticeable at a huge number of points in history. He played a significant part in the development of jazz and popular music, playing the double bass and violin, and composing some enduring standard songs.

As a youngster starting out on the bass, he was tipped by the mobster Al Capone, who stuffed $10 notes into the f-holes of his instrument. He was spotted as a talented performer in radio commercials for Rival dog food, and it was a twist of fate that the comedy question-and-answer routine he developed on the road as violinist with Chico Marx was transferred to celluloid by Leon Bellasco. When one of the vocal quartet that he sang with went on to stardom, it was not Frigo but the man who stood next to him, the tenor Mel Tormé. When he launched a close harmony bebop group in the style of George Shearing’s, it was not Frigo, the founder of the Four Winds, who found stardom, but the group’s guitarist, Herb Ellis, who was hired by Oscar Peterson.

Yet by the sheer length of his career Frigo eventually found fame late in life. Appearing on the Johnny Carson show as an octogenarian jazz fiddler, he was asked by Carson why he came to stardom so late, and Frigo replied: “I wanted to take as long as I could so I wouldn’t have time to become a has-been.” Hailed in his mid80s by the musicologists Dan Morgenstern and Gunther Schuller as one of the most original violinists in jazz, Frigo enjoyed an Indian summer making numerous acclaimed albums and playing with many of the greatest names in jazz.

Born in Chicago, Frigo began his musical career at Curtis Junior High School playing the violin, and later the tuba. He taught himself the trumpet for fun, and then took up the double bass, which became his main instrument for some decades. His first professional jobs with Al Deihm’s orchestra were before he left high school and he was soon on the road with Vic Abbs and the Four Californians. It was their commercials that drew him to the attention of Chico Marx, with whom he toured in 1942.

During wartime service as a coast-guard, Frigo discovered bebop, being billeted alongside the pianist Al Haig and the trombonist Kai Winding. On his discharge, he joined Jimmy Dorsey’s big band, with which he went on the road for a year. It was after this that, with Herb Ellis and the pianist Lou Carter, he formed the Four Winds, and in 1947 wrote his first big hit, Detour Ahead. It was recorded by the likes of Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday (whose version became the soundtrack for a screened Lexus commercial). His next significant song, I Told Ya I Love Ya, Now Get Out!, was a hit for Woody Herman, and more recently surfaced in the TV romantic comedy Moonlighting. His most frequently performed song, however, was the official Chicago Cubs anthem, Hey, Hey, Holy Mackerel.

After the Four Winds broke up Frigo worked as a studio musician; from the late 1940s until the mid1970s he made hundreds of television commercial backing tracks and accompanied such singers as Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington and Julie Andrews on disc and in live performances.

He also directed the band for his wife, the model and singer Brittney Browne. In the 1970s, however, he began to tire of playing the bass, and revived his violin, at first playing incognito at the Regency Hyatt Hotel in Chicago, and then broadcasting country music every Saturday night as the fiddler with the Sage Riders.

This led to him making his first appearances in three decades as a jazz fiddler, recording with Monty Alexander, Herb Ellis and Ray Brown, before making a series of discs under his own name for the Chiaroscuro and Arbors labels. Part of his rich, vibrant sound was down to the 19th-century violin by William Hill of London which he played but, as Gunther Schuller wrote of him recently, “He still plays technically perfectly and with undiminished energy, enthusiasm and inventiveness, at an age when most fiddlers have long ago hung up their instrument in the nearest closet.” He remained an active player until the time of his death.

His wife and his son, the drummer Rick Frigo, survive him.

Johnny Frigo, jazz violinist, bassist and composer, was born on December 27, 1916. He died on July 5, 2007, aged 90