The inspiring story of Willie Ruff and Dwike Mitchell, two American jazz icons, who brought jazz to the attention of millions of people around the world.
two living legends
Nowhere are the two men more different than in what they do when a performance is over. By metabolism, Mitchell is a purebred artist, acutely tuned to his senses and his body. He lives close to the elemental forces: food, fatigue, sleep, germs, weather, people, the discomforts of travel. He forgets names, places, dates, papers, possessions and other mundane details."The spirits will take care of it, " he says. "If it's meant to happen it will."
Ruff has no such faith in predestination. If it happens it's because he makes it happen. Ruff puts every minute to work. On airplanes and in airports he is always reading a book. In his hotel room he is the ant laying up provisions for the season ahead; there is nothing of the grasshopper in him. Before breakfast this morning he was up practicing Mozart's Second Concerto for Orchestra and French Horn, which he will play with the Boston Classical Orchestra in May. He was accompanied by an add-a-part tape of the concerto, which, like his tape recorder, he remembered to bring along. (Mitchell left his glasses in Alabama on Sunday and mislaid his wallet yesterday.) ...
I think of all the rooms where Mitchell and Ruff have stayed since they were discovered by the Pryor-Menz Agency in 1955. Even then the agency was an old one - it had been in business since the 19th century. Now it wanted two personable young musicians who could play and explain jazz on college campuses. The two young musicians will never forget the first day they went out on the circuit ... (p. 115, 116)
Dozens of unusual teachers had crossed (Ruff's) path and taught him what he needed to know next, but nobody had taught him more than he had taught himself. The fifty-one-year-old man in St Mark's (cathedral in Venice) was the fifteen-year-old private who willed himself to learn the French horn in the boiler room of an army barracks in Cheyenne. The man who taught himself eight languages because of the doors they might unlock found that one could unlock the doors of St Mark's; no interpreter could have opened those doors for him. (p. 160)
irene bom ~ songwriter © 2022