Willie Ruff obit

Willie Ruff, a world renowned jazz musician who played with greats and taught at Yale, dies at 92

 

He was not on the list.

Noted jazz musician and educator Willie Ruff, known for playing with luminaries including Miles Davis and Leonard Cohen, has died at the age of 92.

Born near Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Ruff would go on to teach music at Yale University for nearly 50 years. Though he would eventually get a graduate degree and begin his stint on the faculty in 1971, when Ruff began as an undergrad it was his first time in a racially unified classroom.

Ruff played in the Mitchell-Ruff Duo with pianist Dwike Mitchell for over 50 years. Mitchell and Ruff first met 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. Mitchell and Ruff later played in Lionel Hampton's band but left in 1955 to form their own group. 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 Mitchell-Ruff Duo was the first jazz band to play in the Soviet Union (1959) and in China (1981). Mitchell died in 2013.

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 one of the founders of the W. C. Handy Music Festival in Florence, Alabama. The first festival was first held in 1982.

Ruff died in Killen, Alabama on December 24, 2023, at the age of 92.