Bill Cole

Who is Bill Cole?

William Shadrack Cole is an American jazz musician and educator. Cole, most unusually for his genre, specializes in non-Western wind instruments, including the Ghanaian atenteben, Chinese suona, Korean hojok and piri, South Indian nagaswaram, North Indian shehnai, Tibetan trumpet, and Australian didjeridu. Cole has a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University, writing his dissertation on the music of John Coltrane.

Cole is the founder and leader of the Untempered Ensemble and has performed with Ornette Coleman, Jayne Cortez, Julius Hemphill, Sam Rivers, James Blood Ulmer, and Fred Ho. He records for the Boxholder label.

He has served as professor of music at Amherst College from 1972 until 1974 and Dartmouth College from 1974 until his retirement in the 1990s. He currently teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University. Beginning in 1983, Cole was targeted by a series of articles in The Dartmouth Review for his unconventional teaching style. After a local newspaper cited the Review articles to call Cole "incompetent", Cole sued the Review for slander. National newspapers published the story, and it was featured on Sixty Minutes. The slander case was settled out of court after two years, but both the Review's and Cole's reputations were damaged. In 1988, three editors to the Dartmouth Review recorded Cole on camera and audio tape during one of his classes, eliciting a violent reaction which damaged the camera. The school charged the three with harassment and disorderly conduct, and suspended them. However, Cole was unable to continue teaching; he said, "I was totally blackballed."