Willie Ruff - Horn, Bass, Author, member of the Mitchell Ruff Duo

Willie Ruff, the Yale School of Music professor and founder of the Duke Ellington Fellowship at Yale in 1972, is a musician, writer and educator of wide-ranging interests and influences. Raised in the north Alabama birthplace of W. C. Handy, the "father of the blues", as a six year old second grader at school one day, he met and was permitted to shake the hand that wrote the SAINT LOUIS BLUES.

After becoming a modestly competent drummer and Boogie Woogie piano player, he lied about his age and enlisted in an army band at 14. Failing to keep up with the older professionals there, he was summarily fired. But, having noticed that competent French horn players are always in high demand, he talked his bandmaster into letting him learn that unforgiving child-killer. By the time he was sixteen, he was good enough to be accepted into the 766 Army Air Corps band in Columbus Ohio among the famed Tuskegee Airmen. There he met the resident nineteen year old piano playing genius named Ivory Dwike Mitchell who taught him to play the bass fiddle.

The Duo they formed lasted until both musicians got out of the army. When they had completed their educations, Ruff at Yale, and Mitchell at the Philadelphia Musical Academy, they re-united in Lionel Hampton's band in 1955. That same year they struck out on their own as the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, working the U.S. nightclub and concert circuits, often as the opening attraction for luminaries such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughn, Dizzy Gillespie etc. Later they began recording and introducing jazz to new audiences, from Russia to China and beyond. Since Dwike Mitchell's death in 2012, Ruff continues to teach, make musical documentaries, and appear on the global concert and lecture circuit.