Bill Cole

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Bill Cole (right) performing with Warren Smith in October 2005, Takoma Park, MD. (not pictured: William Parker.)

William (Bill) Cole (b. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1937) 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 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 African American Studies department at Syracuse University.[1]

Cole has also authored two books about jazz great Miles Davis, one entitled Miles Davis: A Musical Biography (W. Morrow Publishers, 1974), and the other entitled Miles Davis: The Early Years (1994, Da Capo Press). Cole also authored a biography of John Coltrane simply entitled, John Coltrane (2001, Da Capo Press).