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Biography
Willie Ruff,
hornist and bassist, holds both undergraduate and
graduate degrees from Yale University. Upon
receiving his master’s degree in 1954, he tried
to win a position with an American symphony
orchestra, but found that black musicians were not
yet welcome in those ranks. Instead, he accepted
the position of Principal Horn with the Tel Aviv
Symphony. Not long before he was to leave, he
happened to watch The Ed Sullivan Show and saw not
only Lionel Hampton’s band but, to his surprise,
friend Dwike Mitchell at the piano. After
contacting his old friend, Ruff was invited to
join the Hampton band and never went to Israel. In
1955, the two friends left Hampton to form the
Mitchell-Ruff Duo, with Willie on horn and bass.
But the duo’s real origins go back to 1947, when
they were servicemen stationed at Lockbourne Air
Force Base, near Columbus, Ohio. Mitchell, a
17-year-old pianist with the unit band, needed a
bass player for an Air Force radio show, and he
saw a likely candidate in the newly arrived Ruff,
who at that time only played the Horn. "He
was just a kid, 16 years old," Mitchell
recalls, "with a lot of hair, fire-engine
red, practically down to his eyebrows. But he had
all this energy, and he was eager to learn. So I
taught him. Every time he made a mistake I said,
‘You got to stand in the corner,’ and he hated
that, and he’d scream and holler—he had the
loudest scream you ever heard. But he never made
the same mistake again." Since 1955, the Duo
has recorded, performed, and lectured on jazz
extensively in the United States, Asia, Africa and
Europe. it had the advantage, Ruff recalls, of
being the least expensive group in jazz, and it
was therefore booked as the second act with the
best and most expensive bands of the day - Dizzy
Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count
Basie—in Birdland, the Embers, the Village
Vanguard, Basin Street East and other leading
nightclubs. They were all riding the crest of one
of the most popular eras of jazz—an era that
would soon end with the advent of rock and the
dominance of television.
What made it an unusually rich period for
Mitchell and Ruff was that the older musicians,
after playing their set, would stick around and
tell the two younger men what they were doing
wrong and what they could do better. "We
learned everything from those men," Ruff
recalls. "They were our mentors." This
experience, coupled with the same kind of
generosity that they had found among the older
musicians who were stationed at the air force
base, nourished a teaching bent in Mitchell and
Ruff that shaped their own lives careers. In the
late 1950s they toured widely for a group called
Young Audiences, playing and demonstrating jazz
for students in elementary schools and high
schools, and since the mid-1960s their main format
has been and still is the college concert. They
give 60 or 70 a year on college campuses, where
they are great favorites. It was the Mitchell-Ruff
Duo that introduced jazz to the Soviet Union, in
1959, playing and teaching at conservatories in
Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Yalta, Sochi, and Riga;
and it was the Mitchell-Ruff Duo that brought jazz
to China, in 1981, playing and teaching at
conservatories in Shanghai and Peking. Before the
first trip Ruff taught himself Russian, his
seventh language, and before the second trip he
learned Chinese, thereby enabling himself to
explain to his listeners, in their own language,
the roots and lineage of American jazz, with
Mitchell demonstrating on the piano.
Teaching and learning have been strong currents
in the lives of both men. Ruff joined the faculty
at Yale in 1971, and has taught Music History,
courses on Ethnomusicology, an interdisciplinary
Seminar on Rhythm, and a course on Instrumental
Arranging. He is founding Director of the Duke
Ellington Fellowship Program at Yale, a
community-based organization sponsoring
world-class artists mentoring and performing with
Yale students and young musicians from the New
Haven Public School System. The program brings the
giants of black American music to New Haven
throughout the year to teach at Yale and in the
city’s predominantly black public schools:
singers like Odetta and Bessie Jones, arrangers
like Benny Carter, tap dancers like Honi Coles and
instrumentalists like Charlie Mingus and Dizzy
Gillespie.
Ruff’s 1992 memoir, A Call to Assembly was
awarded the Deems Taylor ASCAP award. He has also
written widely on Paul Hindemith, one of his
teachers at Yale, and on his professional
association with the American composers, Duke
Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. His collaborations
with Yale geologist, John Rodgers on the musical
astronomy of the 17th -century scientist, Johannes
Kepler, resulted in an important "planetarium
for the ear" currently on CD and published
widely in international astronomy journals. Ruff
has also written on music and dance in Russia, and
on the introduction of American Jazz in China
where he has lectured in Mandarin. his next book,
Six Roads to Chicago explores the relation of
culture in Chicago to life in its hinterlands.
Film is also an important teaching tool to him,
and he has visited the pygmies of the Central
African Republic, the master drummers of Bali, the
tribesmen of Senegal and various other remote
societies to make films about their drum music and
language.
Ruff is a man on the move, constantly
generating new projects to supplement an academic
and artistic life that is already full.
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