Willie Ruff (September 1, 1931 – December 24, 2023) was an American jazz musician, specializing in the French horn and double bass, and a music scholar and educator, primarily as a Yale professor from 1971 to 2017.
Willie Henry Ruff Jr. was born in Sheffield, Alabama. He was one of eight children, and his father left the family before Willie was a year old. His mother died from tuberculosis when he was 13.Willie then went to live with his father and attend high school in Evansville, Indiana. In 1946, at age 14, he lied about his age, forged his father's signature, and joined the Army on the expectation of developing a career as a drummer. When the band had too many percussionists and the horns were the weakest section, Willie volunteered to learn to play the horn. He learned on his own from an Oscar Franz method book, practicing in the boiler room.
When Willie was 16 years old and playing in the band at segregated Lockbourne Air force Base near Columbus, Ohio, he started taking lessons from Abe Kniaz, first horn in the Columbus Philharmonic Orchestra. He discovered that he had been using incorrect fingerings and soon improved his technique, musical knowledge, and other knowledge under Kniaz's guidance. It was while stationed at Lockbourne that Willie met his future duo partner, Dwike Mitchell, who recruited Ruff to play bass with his unit band for an Air Force radio program. Ruff continued to study orchestral horn, and attended the Yale School of Music as an undergraduate (Bachelor of Music, 1953) and graduate student (Master of Music, 1954). He then joined Lionel Hampton's band, with which Mitchell was already playing, and the two musicians left to form a duo in 1955.
Together as the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, they played as "second act" to artists such as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie. From 1955 to 2011, the duo regularly performed and lectured in the United States, Asia, Africa, and Europe. The 1959 Mitchell-Ruff Duo was the first jazz band to play in the Soviet Union. In 1966 they accompanied President Lyndon Johnson to Mexico, and the following year they made a film in Brazil which traced the African roots of Brazilian music. Ruff was chosen by John Hammond to be the bass player for the recording sessions of Songs of Leonard Cohen, an album first released in 1967. During those sessions, he and Cohen laid down the bed tracks for most of the songs on the album.
Ruff was a faculty member at the Yale School of Music from 1971 until his retirement in 2017, teaching music history, ethnomusicology, and arranging. Ruff's classes at Yale, often with partner Dwike Mitchell, were free-flowing jam sessions: roller-coaster rides through the colours of American Improvisational Music. The duo could play in the style of most notable jazz artists and related styles. They had a large repertoire. Ruff was founding Director of the Duke Ellington Fellowship Program at Yale, a community-based organization sponsoring artists mentoring and performing with Yale students and young musicians from the New Haven Public School System. The program was founded in 1972 as a "Conservatory Without Walls" to "'capture the essence and spirit' of the tradition of African-American music". By its 30th anniversary in 2002, the program had reached an estimated 180,000 students in New Haven schools.
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| The Duo in China |
From 1976 to 1977, he held a visiting appointment at Duke University, where he oversaw the jazz program and directed the Duke Jazz Ensemble. In 1979, with the scientist John Rodgers, he recorded a realization of Harmonices mundi. He was also on the faculty at UCLA and Dartmouth. The Mitchell-Ruff trio played in China in 1981. Ruff was one of the founders of the W. C. Handy Music Festival in Florence, Alabama. The first festival was first held in 1982. In 1983 Ruff recorded as an unaccompanied soloist in St. Marks basilica in Venice. He was fluent in eight languages, and his unusual talents as both a performer and a teacher have helprd to make jazz accessible to audiences throughout the world.
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| Mingus, Ellington & Ruff |
In 1992, Ruff published his memoir, titled A Call to Assembly: The Autobiography of a Musical Storyteller. The autobiography was hailed as "an unmitigated delight" and was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. Ruff was a 1994 inductee of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame. In 2000, he received the Connecticut Governor's Arts Award for his work with the Duke Ellington Fellowship Program. In May 2013, he was awarded the Sanford Medal. The Sanford Medal is the highest honour from Yale University's School of Music.
Ruff was known for uncovering links between traditional black gospel music and unaccompanied psalm singing. Ruff's theory was that the Scottish Presbyterian practice of lining out, in which a precentor read or chanted a line of the psalm, which was then sung by the congregation, led to the call and response form of black gospel music. Ruff co-created the documentary "A Conjoining of Ancient Song", which focuses on a rapidly vanishing form of congregational singing that is shared by Scottish, African American, and Native American music. It received its world premiere screening at Yale in 2013. Ruff's work in this area was also a subject of Sterlin Harjo's 2014 documentary film, This May Be the Last Time.
Throughout his time with the duo, Dwike Mitchell maintained a residence in New York City and a parallel career teaching piano there. In 2012, after becoming ill, he returned to his native South, spending his last months in Jacksonville, Florida where he died on April 7, 2013, of pancreatic disease. Ruff retired from teaching at Yale in 2017. A year later, the university bestowed on Ruff an honorary doctorate. He died at his home in Killen, Alabama on December 24, 2023, at the age of 92.
(Edited from the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, The Horn Society & Wikipedia)
