Jazz musician Willie Ruff, founding director of the Duke Ellington Fellowship Program at Yale, returns to campus on Oct. 14 to celebrate the program’s 50th anniversary. Through the Ellington program, dubbed The Conservatory without Walls, renowned musicians mentored and performed with young people at Yale and throughout New Haven. As Yale News reported in 2002, since the program’s inception in 1972, Duke Ellington Fellows had by then worked with an estimated 180,000 New Haven public school students.

Yale University established an endowment fund for the fellowship—named for jazz legend Duke Ellington—to expand the study of African American music. At the inaugural ceremony in Woolsey Hall on Oct. 7, 1972, University President Kingman Brewster presented Ellington with an honorary medallion. “Duke,” Brewster said, “I am here simply to say, it is your university.” Among the fifty other recipients of the Duke Ellington Fellows medal that day were jazz greats Mary Lou Williams, Eubie Blake, Jo Jones, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, and Willie Ruff.

Ruff, a French horn and acoustic bass player, received both his undergraduate (1953) and graduate (1954) degrees from Yale School of Music and was on the school’s faculty from 1971 to 2017. Ruff is also a documentary filmmaker. In his 2017 interview with the Film Archive’s Managing Archivist Brian Meacham, Ruff spoke about his interest in film as a way to explore music and ethnographic studies. By the time he moved to Los Angeles, he said, his appetite for film was “whetted.” He enrolled in the University of Southern California (USC) film school, which he described as “a sea of rich possibilities.” Before teaching music at Yale, Ruff taught film at USC. His dual interests led to the creation of Tony Williams in Africa (1973); The Soul of St. Simon’s Island, Georgia (1981); Shanghai Blues (1981); and The Beginnings of Bebop (1981), which Ruff donated to the Film Archive.

The Film Archive, Yale School of Music, and the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library—with support from Paul L. Joskow, MPhil ’70, PhD’72, and from the Richard Warren Jr. ’59 Fund for the Preservation and Promotion of Music—are collaborating to host the semester-long program “Celebrating Willie Ruff and the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Ellington at Yale Series.” The celebration will launch on Oct. 14 with these events:

Ruff’s film The Beginnings of Bebop, his memoir A Call to Assembly, and other materials are available through the library. Read more about the Treasures from the Yale Film Archive screening of Conservatory without Walls: Jazz at Yale and Beyond.

Yale University Library P.O. BOX 208240 New Haven, CT 06520-8240 (203) 432-1775