A Tribute to Dwike Mitchell

Shoreline Arts Alliance just learned of the death of jazz pianist Dwike Mitchell, one-half of the Mitchell/Ruff Duo.  Dwike passed away on April 7 in Jacksonville, FL.  We extend our heartfelt sympathies to Willie Ruff, his jazz partner for more than 55 years and to the jazz community.

The Mitchell-Ruff Duo performed on several occasions for Shoreline Arts Alliance, the last time in January of 2008 in celebration and recognition of 50 years as the longest, continually performing jazz duo in the world.  I can still remember the fascinating conversations I had with Dwike while chauffering him to and from Union Station (New Haven).  He was a humble man with an amazing gift.  In that performance in 2005, he needed assistance crossing the sanctuary at the First Congregational Church in Branford to reach the piano but once he sat down and his fingers touched the keys there was no stopping him.  He Willie Ruff , French horn and bass, delighted that audience with a stroll down memory lane – not only musically but with a plethora of anecdotes and stories that they shared. 

What set the Mitchell-Ruff Duo apart was their missionary zeal. From 1955 to 2011, their thousands of concerts at schools and colleges and in foreign countries where jazz was taboo doubled as music appreciation classes for the young and uninitiated, and came to define the duo at least as much as their professional work, which was formidable. Both Dwike and Willy were classically trained.  They met in the Army in the late 1940s, went their separate ways in pursuit of education under the G.I. Bill — Mr. Mitchell to a Philadelphia conservatory, Mr. Ruff to the Yale School of Music — and reunited in 1954 as members of Lionel Hampton’s band. The two struck out on their own in 1955, opening for major acts like Ellington and Count Basie.

They were never embraced by jazz critics. Some viewed their classical training as detrimental to their credibility as jazz artists. But their academic backgrounds propelled the introspective Mr. Mitchell and the kinetic Mr. Ruff to world fame in 1959, when Mr. Ruff, who had a part-time teaching job at the Yale School of Music, arranged for them to accompany the Yale Russian Chorus on a summer visit to the Soviet Union.  

The duo performed an impromptu jazz concert at Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow during the trip, in defiance of state injunctions against the bourgeois decadence of jazz. Time magazine called it the first unofficial concert by American jazz musicians in the Soviet Union. (Benny Goodman and his orchestra gave the first official one three years later, in a deal between the State Department and the Soviet Ministry of Culture.)

They reprised the feat in the People’s Republic of China in 1981, demonstrating jazz techniques at conservatories in Shanghai and Beijing — openly this time. Headlines called it another first: the first jazz performance in China after the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Ruff, now a professor at Yale and curator of the Duke Ellington Fellowship, which he helped create in 1972 to bring well-known jazz musicians there to teach, said in a recent phone interview that Mr. Mitchell was “my main musical inspiration.”

Knowing and working with these two legendary musicians is a gift that I will always treasure.

Information for article New York Times Obituary April 18

Contributed by: Donita Aruny