Yale School Of Music Photo
Ruff, who retires this year after a long and illustrious career.
For jazz musician and professor Willie Ruff, the Langston Hughes Project show on Friday — with spoken-word poet Kenyon Adams and the Ron McCurdy Quartet — echoes back to another time in his life in New Haven, when Langston Hughes himself came to town.
It was 1960. Ruff was teaching part-time at Yale then and had already firmly established himself as a jazz musician. He’d recorded two albums with Miles Davis — the classics Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess — and appeared on the Gil Evans record Gil Evans & Ten. He’d taken jazz to Russia, defying the government’s prohibitions against the music, as one half of the Mitchell-Ruff duo with pianist Dwike Mitchell.
And he owned and ran the Play-Back Club, a jazz club on Winchester Avenue near the gun factory’s campus. He’d opened the Play-Back because he wanted a home for his own trio — he, Mitchell, and drummer Charlie Smith, who’d played with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Mitchell and Ruff convinced Smith to get out of New York and join them.
“I didn’t want to own a nightclub, but the only way to break in this group was to have a place to play on your terms when you wanted to. And I could afford it, so I bought this joint,” Ruff said in an interview on WNHH’s “Northern Remedy.” (Click below to hear the full interview.)
When the trio wasn’t playing, Ruff booked other acts, including jazz luminaries Stan Getz, Roy Eldridge, Teddy Wilson, Slam Stewart, Marian McPartland, and Toshiko Akiyoshi. He hosted chamber music and children’s concerts.
“And Mimi Catalan and some of her ladies and sorority friends — this group of elegant, educated black women — formed a club called the Artisans, and they would do little social, cultural events for themselves, privately, in somebody’s home,” Ruff said. “Mimi Catalan was a classmate of Langston Hughes. And she said, ‘ladies, if we want to step it up a bit, we ought to rent Willie Ruff’s nightclub and bring Langston Hughes up on a Sunday afternoon to read his poetry.”
The cocktails and supper at the Play-Back Club were part of the draw. So was the existence of an express train from 125th Street in Harlem to New Haven that ran regularly and took 55 minutes.
“This event was great for the ladies, who rented the place. It was great for me because it paid some of the bills. It was great for Langston, who was delighted to get 200 bucks in 1960. 200 bucks in 1960 was 200 bucks!” Ruff said. “So he could have a pleasant Sunday afternoon and be back on 125th Street, around the corner from where he lived, in a very reasonable time.”
“The event was so successful that a couple years later the ladies came back and wanted to do it again,” Ruff continued. “And I said ‘of course not! What do you think this is, a house of poetry or a jazz club?’ They knew I was putting them on. I jumped at the opportunity to do it a second time.”
Ruff has been seizing — and making — such opportunities for his entire life. Which is one of the reasons why Friday’s concert, which Ruff helped organize as artistic director of Yale’s Ellington Jazz Series, resonates so much.
The concert — Friday at 7:30 p.m. at Morse Recital Hall — will have poet Adams and the McCurdy Quartet performing Langston Hughes’ “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz,” for which Hughes wrote accompanying musical cues. Imagery from the Harlem Renaissance will be part of the performance. The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is co-sponsoring the event as part of a yearlong series recognizing the 75th anniversary of the founding of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters.
And this year represents a kind of victory lap for Ruff himself, as he’s retiring at the end of it. It’s thus an occasion to reflect on a life and career that has taken him around the world and into the heart of jazz, and made him an integral part of the Elm City’s musical history.
Musician and Teacher
Ruff was born in Sheffield, Ala. in 1931, in part of the Muscle Shoals area, long famous as a cradle for great musicians. As a 6 year old with promising musical inclinations, he got to shake the hand of W.C. Handy, the “father of the blues,” a successful music publisher, and native of Muscle Shoals as well, when Handy visited his elementary school for a performance. Handy impressed on the students of Sheffield the importance of education.
Ruff recalled Handy’s message: “Stay where you are, get all the book learning all you can, because that’s the only thing that’s between you and the devastation you have inherited. Stand up for and acknowledge and protect the beautiful heritage you have.” Handy had been born in 1873, just eight years after slavery ended.
“I stood in this little line and was permitted to shake the hand that wrote the St. Louis Blues, and I was never the same boy again.”
In 1946, when he was 14, he lied about his age to enter the Army. What made him do that?
“Hunger,” Ruff said. “Desperation. My mama died when I was 13, so by 14 I was living on short rations, raggedy, no future in sight.”
Segregation was still in full force, and the army was reorganizing itself in the wake of World War II. “If you were 17 and had your parents’ permission, you could enlist,” Ruff said. Ruff was playing in the high school band. He had a cousin who had been recruited, and he lured Ruff in with “all the food you can eat, more clothes than you can tote on your back, and a monthly salary. I said, ‘how am I going to do that? I’m only 14 years old.” He says, ‘for a musician, you sure are dumb.’” Ruff forged his father’s signature, joined the army, and there met a few of the people who would change his life.
“I had hundreds of fathers in these older musicians” he met in the military. One of them was Dwike Mitchell, who he met in the band he was assigned to.
“The first thing I heard about the band was ‘we have a 19-year-old genius piano player.’ It was the first time I’d heard about a teenage genius that I could see. I’d heard about Mozart and Charlie Parker … but here was one wearing a soldier’s suit just like me. ”
The first Christmas after they met, “I didn’t have a home to go to, so I just stayed on the base,” Ruff said. Meanwhile, Mitchell “had had a fuss with his father … so he wasn’t going home either.” They connected; Ruff was already playing French horn. Mitchell showed him how to play blues on the upright bass.
“That was on Tuesday,” Ruff said. “On Saturday, we were on the radio.” They played together for a couple years in the military. “We decided then that when we got out, we were going to go to school and get some education, and then get back together,” Ruff said, “and I’ll be damned if it didn’t happen.”
The Mitchell-Ruff Duo played together for over 50 years, until Mitchell’s death in 2013.
Ruff applied to Yale after reading in a jazz magazine that Charlie Parker would have liked to go to its music school, knowing that the military would pay his way if he could get in. Yale asked Ruff to audition. “I brought my French horn and played an audition, and by some miracle, they let me in,” Ruff said. “And that’s how I got here where we sit.”
He graduated Yale in 1953 and earned his masters in 1954. He saw New Haven’s jazz scene flourish and wane — the nightclub scene, he suggests, brought to its knees by television. He recorded with Lalo Schifrin in 1965. Two years later he played bass with Leonard Cohen on his first album, a recording he first heard only years after the fact.
In 1971 he joined the faculty of the Yale School of Music. The following year founded the Duke Ellington Fellowship Program. For over 40 years, that program has brought jazz greats to New Haven to perform in both the city’s concert halls and its public schools, inspiring new generations through music.
W.C. Handy would be proud.
Electric Silence
Reggie Jackson Photo
Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, and Ruff on the Woolsey Hall stage during a historic 1972 convocation that brought 40 musical icons to Yale, established the Yale School of Music’s Duke Ellington Fellowship, and launched the Ellington Jazz Series.
“Jazz has been transformed into a different subject in the whole scheme of culture. It’s becoming more and more archival, it’s becoming a subject of academic discourse, and less performance,” Ruff said when asked about the state of the genre now. He doesn’t have a “crystal ball” to say where the music is headed. But he misses the days when it was intimately connected to dancing; something was lost in jazz when people stopped swinging to it.
“I never lived with electricity the whole time I lived in Alabama. We had one cold-water faucet in the kitchen. So there was no electricity and no radio. But there was always dancing. Dancing to silence,” Ruff said. “I would watch my big sister, big brother, and my mama, all dancing together, and they would change partners.”
They called out dances as they went. “Now one step. Now two step. Now Suzy Q. Now truck. Now black bottom. Now buzzard lope,” Ruff said. “The house is rocking and jumping. I’m maybe two years old. I’m down close to the floor, wishing I could get up there and do what they’re doing to that silence.”
“Because that silence,” he added, “was electrically charged.”
The Langston Hughes Project performs Friday, Oct. 28 at 7:30 p.m. at Morse Recital Hall, 470 College St. Tickets start at $20, $10 for students. Click here for more information.