A Visit with Legendary Musician and Educator Willie Ruff

It's six minutes after 11, this is 89.3 WLRHFM HD1 Huntsville, member supported public radio for Huntsville, and the Tennessee Valley. I'm delighted today because I have the opportunity to chat with Willie Ruff, jazz musician on both Horn and Bass, and he had a long and illustrious career in the Army band joined at the age of 14, we'll be talking with Willie in just a moment, but let's listen first. Willie Ruff really sets our feet of tapins, and you are recording here with what group?

With Lionel Hampton's orchestra, and Buddy Rich was sitting in on the drums. Did he just drop by? No, he was friends with Nat King Cole and Lionel Hampton, two Alabama boys who had gone on to Chicago as kids in grade school and had played in bands together in Chicago and just stayed in touch all that time. That was the Air Mares, Elle Air Mail Special, was the title of the song. Let's listen. Willie Ruff, welcome back to WLRH, the last time you were here, we looked up with some pictures

we took in the year 1991, a little while ago, a little while ago, but you've been very, very busy touring, playing your horn, and teaching at Yale University. How long did you teach at Yale? I taught at Yale for 46 years, Jimmy. I had them food that they thought I knew what I was doing, but you were probably one of the youngest members of the United States Army band because you didn't tell the truth when you joined up. That's true, I was a little hard up, I was in dire straits, but I also was hungry for an education, and I learned that the GI Bill was available to all veterans, so I lied about my age and got in the Army, and I got out before I was old enough to get in.

Because I happened to read in a jazz magazine, I interviewed with Charlie Parker, and he was asked what he wanted to do with the next several years of his life, and he said, well, I am crazy about this German cad who's a composer, named Paul Hendemuth, and he's teaching composition at Yale. If I could do it, I would go there, sit at his feet, and learn some music. And I'd been trying to decide where I would use this windfall that Uncle Sam owed me, and Charlie Parker put it right there for me, I applied, and by some miracle, they let me in. You know, today, I just discovered this this morning, Willie Ruff, today is Hendemuth's birthday. Get out, is it? It is. November of 2016, how about that? Wow. But when you did join, you, of course, did not tell them your true age. That's right.

I told them that I was 17 and had my father's permission to join, which I forged, and I had it notarized for 25 cents. The guy at the grocery store who had the notary stamp, didn't even look at the paper he was signing. He was weighing a sack of onions. And so I took my little affidavit and to the recruiter in Evansville, Indiana, and left and started my career in music. Would you say you, where you look like an older 14, that's how old you were? Probably looked at 11, but they were hard up. They wanted warm bodies. This was 1946, so it was just after the war, and they needed replacements for all the people who were getting discharged, so they weren't looking. You can't do that anymore now, unfortunately, because I talked to kids who want to know how, you know, would love to be able to do that.

Sure. You described your words about retirement, and the retirement has just, you decided that last year in 2016, and you were coming back to Alabama, your home state, or you described retirement as being endlessly interesting and unimaginably challenging. What about the unimaginable, let's see, what about the challenging part? Well, Judy, I promised myself that when I retired, I was going to make every week have six Saturdays, and if I had six Saturdays to just play, I would have to rest on Sunday. So I thought that would make the perfect week. It's challenging, keeping to that plan. Because I get to do pleasant things like come visit with you. And are you doing much playing? Not much. How about practicing?

How about you being your, I'm sure? Not a lot, but it feels good to rest it, I'm sure. How do you structure your days? I mean, you have spent 46 years teaching at Yale, and you'd have to have had a good bit of structure in your days. I didn't teach that often, Judy, I taught one class a week on Friday mornings, and my sister asked me that question, said, well, how much are you doing now? Yeah, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm getting ready. It takes me all week to get ready for that one class on Friday morning. And she said, you mean you want to teach one day a week? Man, that's no job. That's a position. And what's wrong with positions? That's exactly right. But you are not teaching at all now. No. No. However, you were just telling me that you are going to be doing a lot of traveling, including overseas, and you just got back from Austria?

That's right. You went to Austria to hear Paul Hindemann's opera. And Charlie Parker, he really started something, and it was so interesting. That period, just after World War II, the campuses all over the world were just loaded with GIs. And it's the smartest money the US government ever spent was educating all of these people, and they're all thriving, and the taxes we pay is far different than had they not spent the money on us. But I mean, the khakis, everybody wore khaki pants, you know, it's like, you know, all of our khakis were GI. We didn't buy them in stores. We brought them home from it. From the issue. GI issue, that's exactly. And those who were married had veterans housing on campus, and on the Yale campus, over there in the veterans housing area, they called it fertile valley because there were so many babies.

And the communal laundry was constantly going because there were so many diapers, you know, fertile valley. Really rough, did you always intend to come back to Alabama after serving for 46 years? I did, you know, something about Alabama that got in my blood at a very early age, there were people, when I was a child, I knew in my own neighborhood in Sheffield, Alabama, maybe a dozen or more people who were way past 100 years old. And they would say to me and other youngsters, wherever you go and you're going to go places far away from here, you'd be sure and tell them you're from Sheffield, Alabama. And so I always had a feeling about a connection with where I'm from. And I went back and I bought the land I used to plow with the mule when I was 10 years

old. That's, you've been in my, that you visited there. Yes. That's right. That's right. That's right. So I felt that connection. I don't have the mule anymore and I'm not going to plow. And I wouldn't pick the cotton out of an aspirin bottle. Now I did all of it, enough of that in my, in my childhood. So that's how I'm making these six Saturdays work every, every week, I'm lazy, I'm sure. If you just turned on your radio, I had a pleasure and the privilege today of chatting with Willie Ruff, jazz musician and former professor at Yale University, Willie is a native of Alabama and headed for home. Yes. So let's listen to just a bit more of, I asked Willie to bring us several of the CDs that were, and since it's autumn, Willie, tell us a bit about this. Autumn leaves. This is recorded with Dwight Mitchell.

We were the Mitchell Ruff duo until Mitchell died about six years ago. And this is one of our mainstays and Mitchell is a fantastic pianist. And he taught me how to play the bass in the Air Force. We were stationed with the Tuskegee Airmen and Mitchell was already in this band, very established band, more than 120 people in a band, a marching band and a concert band. We played parades on the parade field. We played concert versions of Susan Marches for memory, for memory. And this was quite a place that was there. So it's end of its birthday, but I would like to hear Dwight Mitchell's piano and my bass on Autumn leaves, celebration of Paul End of its birthday. And we'll hear a bit of end of it and a little later. Here he is. Here he is.

Here he is. Here he is. Willie Ruff, how did you meet Dwight Mitchell? I met Dwight Mitchell when I re-enlisted my second hitch in the military. I enlisted 18 months then and then I got out and I knew about this terrific air base where the Tuskegee Airmen was stationed. And I paid my way there and enlisted by this time I think I was still 16 and I re-enlisted in that band.

And the minute I got there I started asking people, the band had more than 100 members. And I wasn't sure I had to play an audition and all that. And I asked one of the men there, I said, what is really the main thing with this band? He said, we've got a 19 year old genius, the pianist and it was Dwight Mitchell. You were 16 at that time. And he was a couple of years older and everybody went home on Christmas break. I didn't go home because I didn't really have the home to go to. But he stayed there. So it was just a two of us around and he saw me, I had picked up a base and was trying to figure it out. Newed Lynn around. And he said, if you're serious about that, I can show you how to do that. He said, I had a great bass player who was here and he's just discharged so I don't have a bass player now and I can teach you how to do it. I watched what he did.

And just by watching, he knew where all the notes were and how to get to them. And that was on Tuesday and on Saturday, we played on the radio. In Columbus. Do you remember what you played? Yes, we played all the things you are, which is very difficult and I made a mistake and he choked me. You would only know how to play the bass for what, for days? That's right. I didn't make mistakes after that. Let's talk just a bit about your early musical heroes. Okay. Yeah. Who were they? My early musical heroes were a boy, a neighboring boy who lived across the street from me, who gave me my first music lessons. His name was Mut McCord. And he was 11 years older than me, a white boy who went to a different school and he would bring his drums home from school and set up on the lawn and his house and practice. And I got so interested in that.

My mama said, don't you go across that street because you might get run over. Well, the street wasn't even paved and a car came by maybe every three days. So there wasn't much danger of my getting run over. So I hung out with Mut and he taught me how to read music. I was about six, you know. And then he was playing Count Basie recordings and Benny Goodman recordings and all the good stuff from the neighborhood. And when you were at Harvard, you went there and got a bachelor's, then you stayed and you got a master's and then you stayed and you became a professor. Did you enjoy teaching? I loved teaching, Judy. And because they didn't give me a clipboard with a schedule and tell me, so I was invited there because to Yale, because they needed to take a fresh look at what they wanted to, what they thought music was about and the way they should teach.

So they said, well, what do you want to do? What do you see that needs doing? So what a blessing, what a great thing that was for me. And I said, well, I'm really interested in media and using music media as a way of digging into things that I can share with students, but go out and get capture things on film and tape and bring it back for the students and music in schools. So we, when I actually was able to organize the Duke Ellington Fellowship program, which was an educational effort to bring famous people like Ellington to our campus and Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus and all of the UB Blake, we brought music into schools and for more than 200,000 school children within 20 years that we were doing for the students ever.

And you kind of showed up on the faculty. Willie Ruff with me today, Willie Ruff, great jazz musician and professor at Yale University and he has made his way home after retiring. He is now back in Killing, Alabama in a house that he built himself a few years ago. Let's talk just a bit about Paul Hindematt, he was your professor at Yale. And today happens to be his birthday. Wow. That's a coincidence. That's a great coincidence. Yes, it is. Well, Judy, if you don't mind, if it's possible, I would like to play something being its end of its birthday. The reason I went to Yale was Charlie Parker mentioned this story. And the first thing Hindematt did in the class, he taught a class called The History of the Theory of Music. And he was talking about, because he was a theorist and as well as a composer and conductor

and great violist, soloist there. And he wanted the students to know about Johannes Kepler's obsession with music in planetary motion. And Kepler had discovered the three laws of planetary motion. And Kepler had also challenged the musicians of his time to permit him to show them where these harmonic relationships are in the march of the planets around the sun. And then he would show them how they could then take what he pointed out to them and make a planetarium for the ear for the first time. But nobody at that time in the 1600s, Kepler's published his treatise in 1619, nobody could yet measure that the technology hadn't been invented. Now between the time I was a student of Hindematt's at Yale and the time I was invited back

to teach, something had happened. This had been invented and it became possible for the first time to build this planetarium for the ear that Kepler wanted us to have. So I found people, one was a great geologist who was a fabulous mathematician and a person who could put together the computer program that allowed us to make this planetarium for the ear and they wrote a story about it on the front page of the New York Times Tuesday Science section, right? Front page. A couple of days later I get a telephone call in my Yale office and the voice on the other instance Professor Ruff, I said yes, so this is Carl Sagan calling from JPL. We are about to send up a spacecraft called Voyager and we are sending out the sound of

children's voices, voices from Earth, music by Bach, Beethoven, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, all of that. And we think Kepler's work that should be included there, would you allow us permission to include on this golden record that's going above Voyager? You didn't say I think I'll think about it? No, I said of course not, what do you think this is? Of course I said too, I gave permission. And so it's on the golden, the record that's out there and if you've got a few minutes we could listen to the planets as they came out in this recording from Mercury out. So you'll just see a few seconds of Mercury and then Venus and then Earth and Mars and after a while you have a few minutes you'll hear all nine of the planets. So I think we have time to get all of them in entry in that way.

And the next will be Venus whose orbit is almost perfectly circular and it will all be sounding together. And that will be able to hear Venus and then I get here. And then we have Earth and Mars, Venus and Mercury and then we have Earth and Mars, and then we have Earth and Mars and then we have Earth and Mars and then we have Earth and

Mars and then we have Earth and Mars and then we have Earth and then we have Earth and the swore planets we will hear as tones but as beams rather than pitches and helping us to hear as and then we have Earth and then we have even slower than the beams on the Earth and then we have even slower than the beams on the Earth and then we have even I

All five of you are still doing this. Here in the Space Center, I'm going to walk into this room. I'm going to cut my leg. Like a mini-stick. You're going to work into this. I'm going to work into this. I'm going to take this. Yes, the Golden Record is quite famous now. My music has traveled further than my project than I imagine. But that Golden Record now is accessible. You can download it online and hear everything on it.

There's a lot of, it's really intended to represent a sound that would say something about life on our planet. And the fact that Sagan had the vision to include so much music and so much music, that is American. I mean, there's Louis Armstrong there and there's Count Basie and there's the best of the best of the best. I like it. Well, you're off your mother would have been so proud. Oh, thank you, Judy. That's a nicest thing anybody ever said to me. And we're going to have to bring this conversation to a close but it's been such a pleasure for me to be able to just sit and chat with you, Willie, and hadn't done it since 1991 when we were still at the, we were in the same building in 1991. Well, bless your heart. And let's just listen to a bit more of one of your records that you brought. And Willie, thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. The last composition Billy Strayhorn ever wrote and it's

called Sweet for Duo. And Strayhorn died shortly after finishing this. And Duke Ellington had the duo come to Lincoln Center to establish a scholarship at Juilliard in Strayhorn's name. And that was the premiere of this piece. We recorded it in my apartment in Hollywood in 68 or something like, I think just that year after Strayhorn had done. And we used a piano that was provided by Steinway. And Ruben Stein was coming through to use that piano in a recital and the company said, could you keep the piano in your apartment for another month until we don't want to move it twice before Ruben Stein has to use it. So I didn't charge him anything, Judy. For the storage of the piano. And Willie Ruff.

And there we go. What a great time, I've had you this morning.

Willie Ruff, thank you so much again for dropping by and with your friend Abe South. And Abe lives, where do you live, Abe? He's your neighbor, and they're both now settled in killing. This has been such a such a pleasure for all of us and I'm sure for our listeners. Thank you again. Willie Ruff. Thank you, Judy. You're not going to go home and practice, aren't you? I promise you. Abe. Abe, just a day, I guess, give him a CD, that's right. I'm going to go home and practice, I'm going to go home.

I'm going to go home and practice, I'm going to go home and practice. I'm going to go home and practice, I'm going to go home and practice. I'm going to go home and practice, I'm going to go home and practice. I'm going to go home and practice, I'm going to go home and practice. I'm going to go home and practice.

Willie Ruff and Dwight Mitchell. We're going to play a bit of hinderment next.