Jazz musician and longtime Yale faculty member Willie Ruff has died.
"The depth of his intellect and humility was inspirational to many at the school. As musicians, I hope we all seek to embody his love of life and hunger for learning," José García-León, dean of the Yale School of Music, said in a statement posted on the school's website.
Ruff died at his home in Alabama on Dec. 24. He was 92.
Ruff was born in 1931 in Sheffield, Alabama, practically a stone’s throw from Florence, Alabama, the home of WC Handy, the “father of the blues.” In a 2015 interview for Yale’s Oral History of American Music, he recalled looking up to the blues innovator at a very early age.
“I used to sing ‘St. Louis Blues’ by Handy for candy in grocery stores,” Ruff said. “I was about 3, and I got a lot of candy.”
When Ruff was 14, he forged his father’s signature and joined the Army.
It proved to be the best career move he ever made.
During his stint he not only learned the double bass and the French horn, he met his musical partner, pianist Dwike Mitchell. The Mitchell-Ruff duo toured the world for more than 50 years, with Ruff playing both stand up bass and French horn.
Ruff said the duo opened for a lot of famous jazz musicians in the 1950s and 60s.
“Club owners found it attractive to balance their budgets with us. Whenever they were going to have the most expensive, the most famous names in Jazz at their club, they would balance their budgets by hiring the cheapest performers, and that was us,” Ruff said. “There were only two of us. So, we opened for Louis Armstrong, we opened for Ella Fitzgerald, we opened for Duke Ellington.”
Ruff earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Yale School of Music in the late 1950s. In 1971, he became a faculty member, a post he maintained until 2017.
Ruff regarded jazz as a scholarly pursuit, much like classical music.
Soon after his arrival at Yale, he hosted a now famous convocation at Yale’s Woolsey Hall with some of the most famous jazz musicians in the world — greats like Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie. At the gathering, he presented “conservatory without walls,” an initiative that brought African American music traditions like jazz and spirituals to the New Haven community through performances and lectures.
At the same convocation, Ruff also introduced the Duke Ellington Fellowship, a program at Yale that introduced thousands of schoolchildren in New Haven to performances by iconic jazz artists. Over the years, the program has introduced thousands of New Haven-area students to jazz and other forms of music.
Ruff retired from teaching at Yale in 2017. A year later, the university bestowed on Ruff an honorary doctorate.
