The Yale film archive hads recently acquired a forty-five minute film documentary of the 1972 Convocation of the founding of the Duke Ellington Fellows Program at Yale. Even as the founding director of that enterprise, still active today, Professor Ruff only recently became aware of the existence of the documentary that honored Duke Ellington, Marian Anderson along with thirty eight other legends of African American Music.
He recently presented the work at Reed College in Portland, Oregon to the international conference of the Ellington Society that celebrated the centennial of Billy Strayhorn.
Professor Ruff presented this historic documentary before the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences at its February 10th meeting.
About Professor Willie Ruff
Willie Ruff is a musician and scholar of wide-ranging interests and influence. A French horn and bass player, he is also an author, lecturer, and educator. After graduating from Yale, he joined Lionel Hampton’s band and soon collaborated with his friend, pianist Dwike Mitchell, to form the Mitchell-Ruff Duo. The duo performed on the bill with major jazz figures, including Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie, in every major nightclub.
In 1959 they introduced jazz to the Soviet Union, playing and teaching in Russian conservatories, and in 1981 they did the same in China.
On faculty at the Yale School of Music since 1971, Professor Ruff has also been on faculty at UCLA, Dartmouth, and Duke University. He is the founding director of the Duke Ellington Fellowship program at Yale, and his work in bringing jazz artists to Yale and New Haven public schools earned him the Governor’s Arts Award in 2000.
In addition to teaching Yale courses in arranging, ethnomusicology, and folklore, Professor Ruff has led many conferences and research projects exploring music’s wide-ranging impact. He has organized an international conference on the Neurophysiology of Rhythmic Perception and created computerized music based on the theories of seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler.
Professor Ruff’s project on congregational line singing involved a 2005 conference at Yale comparing the traditions practiced in Alabama, Kentucky, and the Gaelic-speaking Free Church Presbyterians in the Scottish Highlands. This conference resulted in three television documentaries and a feature story for NPR’s Morning Edition. His line-singing project continued in 2007 with a conference that included the Muscogee Creek Nation in Oklahoma.
Professor Ruff’s memoir, A Call to Assembly, published in 1991 by Viking Press, received the Deems Taylor Award for excellence in a book on music.
–edited from the Yale School of Music Website.
This meeting is free and open to the public. The meeting begins at 5 p.m. with a reception.