A Call to Assembly: The Autobiography of a Musical Storyteller - Softcover
Music came to Willie ruff early in his Alabama boyhood. It came from Mrs. Nance, the solo bass drummer of the Sanctified church, whose beat "gave her right arm the churning motion of a set of steam locomotive wheels." It came from singing at the grocery store for candy, and from the "chitlin struts: at his home, with young Willie sprinkling cornmeal on the floor to make "gliding" easy for dancing. It came from eavesdropping on the porch ladies, listening to the rhythm of their revelations. It came from the Sheffield School for Colored the day the second grader met a storied Alabama neighbor, W.C. Handy, who played his St. Louis Blues on the trumpet and spoke to the children about "the music of the Negro race."
Music and learning ("Can't nobody take nothin from outta your head," said his first mentor, Daddy Long) set the course of Willie Ruff's life. He sopped up music and learning when he joined the army at age fourteen, coming under the influence of various fatherly music masters. While he was an undergraduate at Yale, it was Paul Hindemith's magnetic presence that expanded Willie's musical horizons. Later, playing the French horn with the Lionel Hampton band and forming the "Duo" with his old piano-playing army sidekick, Dwike Mitchell, Willie learned firsthand from powerful influence like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie. And through his years at Yale as a professor of music, the quest for learning never stopped.
But music wasn't all. A powerfully recurring theme of A Call to Assembly comes from Willie's curiosity about the black soldier in American history. It began when he was in grade school and witnessed an air show by an all-black squadron of fighter pilots from Tuskegee. Later, in the army, Willie met some of those pilots who had fought over Germany and Italy and risked courts-martial to gain the same rights white officers enjoyed. Years later, through a set of extraordinary circumstances, he came across a statement written in 1902 by another Alabama neighbor, an ex-Confederate general who commended the valor of Negro soldiers fighting in the Spanish-American War. It was, Willie writes, as if this general "laid a hand on me from the grave and gave me pride and understanding."
Willie Ruff's is an exhilarating story, told in a distinctive voice that rings clear and true, smart and funny, and is always moving.
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About the Author:
Willie Ruff is the hornist and bassist of the Mitchell-Ruff DUO featuring pianist Dwike Mitchell. The Duo records, performs, and lectures on jazz extensively in the United States, Asia, Africa and Europe. Ruff, who attended the Yale School of Music as an undergraduate and graduate student, has been a faculty member there since 1971 teaching Music History, courses on Ethnomusicology, an lnterdisciplinary Seminar on Rhythm, and a course on Instrumental Arranging.
From Publishers Weekly:
He is founding Director of the Duke Ellington Fellowship Program at Yale, a community based organization sponsoring world-class artists mentoring and performing with Yale students and young musicians from the New Haven Public School System.
Ruff's 1992 memoir, "A Call to Assembly" was awarded the Deems Taylor ASCAP award. He has written widely on Paul Hindemith one of his teachers at Yale, and on his professional association with the American composers, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.
His collaborations with Yale Geologist, John Rodgers on the musical astronomy of the 17th century scientist, Johannes Kepler, resulted in an important "planetarium for the ear" currently on CD and published widely in international astronomy journals.
Ruff has also written on music and dance in Russia, and on the introduction of American Jazz in China where he has lectured in Mandarin. his next book, "Six Roads to Chicago" explore's the relation of culture in Chicago to life in its hinterlands.
Jazz musician Ruff has come a long way from the poor black neighborhood in Sheffield, Ala., where he grew up learning about music any way he could--from the boy next door, the drummer at the Sanctified Church, the sound of the steam-driven calliopes on Tennessee River stern-wheel paddleboats. At 14, seeing a way out of poverty, he lied about his age and enlisted in the Army, where he reveled in daily showers, plentiful food, new clothes and, above all, opportunities to make music. He joined the all-black band as a drummer, but when told he would have to leave because there were too many men on drums, taught himself French horn so he could stay (until then, the band had no French horn players because the instrument was considered too difficult for blacks). After receiving a high school equivalency diploma, he left the service and entered Yale (one of nine black students enrolled in 1949), studied with Paul Hindemith, played in the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and earned a master's degree. Turning down Erich Leinsdorf's invitation to play horn with the Buffalo (N.Y.) Philharmonic, Ruff chose a career in jazz, first appearing with Lionel Hampton and later forming ok with performing earlier? a duo with the brilliant pianist Dwike Mitchell. A composer, filmmaker and professor of music at Yale, Ruff travels all over the world teaching people about jazz. He seems to have unlimited talent and energy. His book is an account of his own remarkable life, but it is also a tribute to many people who have helped and inspired him: his mother, who taught him how to keep his dignity and survive the South's brutal segregation laws; John Brice, the bandmaster who was determined to make the 766th Air Corps Band at the all-black air base in Lockbourne, Ohio, a symphonic ensemble to rival the all-white Army Air Corps Band in Washington, D.C.; the secondhand clothier in New Haven who gave him memorable advice on how to survive at Yale: "Dress British, think Yiddish." Ruff tells his inspiring story wonderfully well. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherKepler Label
- Publication date2005
- ISBN 10 0971671826
- ISBN 13 9780971671829
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages432
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