Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Willie Henry Ruff Jr. was born September 1, 1931 in Sheffield, Alabama. He attended the Yale School of Music earning his Bachelor and Masters of Music by 1954.

He first met Dwike Mitchell in 1947 when they were teenaged servicemen stationed at the former Lockbourne Air Force Base in Ohio. Mitchell recruited Ruff to play bass with his unit band for an Air Force radio program. The two of them went on to later play in Lionel Hampton’s band but left in 1955 to form their own group, the Mitchell-Ruff Duo. They played as a 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 throughout the United States, Asia, Africa, and Europe. The Mitchell-Ruff Duo was the first jazz band to play in the Soviet Union in 1959 and in China in 1981. 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.

He is one of the founders of the W. C. Handy Music Festival in Florence, Alabama, was a faculty member at the Yale School of Music from 1971 until his retirement in 2017, teaching music history, ethnomusicology, and arranging. Willie was a founding Director of the Duke Ellington Fellowship Program at Yale, held a visiting appointment at Duke University, where he oversaw the jazz program and directed the Duke Jazz Ensemble and was on the faculty at UCLA and Dartmouth.

Over the course of his career he recorded as a soloist, in a duo and as a sideman with Quincy Jones, Bobby Hutcherson, Gil Evans, Benny Golson, Milt Jackson, Lalo Schifrin, Sonny Stitt, Clifford Coulter, Miles Davis and Jimmy Smith.

French horn and double bassist Willie Ruff,  who played in the Mitchell-Ruff Duo with pianist for over 50 years, was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, and has published his memoir A Call to Assembly: The Autobiography of a Musical Storyteller, is retired at 91.

More Posts: bandleader,bass,french horn,history,instrumental,jazz,music